


Occupational Hazards

by Untherius



Category: 20th Century CE RPF, The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-20 22:25:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 30,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17031096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Untherius/pseuds/Untherius
Summary: The Martian invasion following the opposition of 1894 was only the beginning.





	1. The Coming of the Martians

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



Supreme Commander Zarthon ek-Ragush leaned forward and peered at the bridge mid-space projection. Ze pointed a tentacle at the image of a planet slowly rotating and a representation of zir ship, Revenge of Zathras.

“What...is... _that_?” ze demanded.

Zir navigator quivered slightly and said, “The Homeworld, Supreme Commander.”

“Impossible,” Zarthon growled.

“Coordinates are correct, Syr.”

“Then explain that!” ze spat, thrusting the tentacle at the holographic world.

“I...I cannot, Syr.”

Zarthon watched zir homeworld's surface, in all its horrifyingly alien topography, drift past zir vision. It was impossible now to tell what had been where. Without a familiar landmark, it was even impossible to establish global coordinates. Gone was the capital City of Gold and Lead. Gone were the great canals. Gone were the quirgom forests. All gone. In their places, tall volcanoes scraped the upper atmosphere, deep chasms cracked the plains, broad dry outwash channels stretched across the land, and countless impact craters of various sizes marred the entire now-waterless planet. The only two familiar features remaining were the twin polar ice caps, but even they looked different, the northern cap twisted and laying on an expanse of black sand. Of an original five moons, two remained, the larger of them, Smurg, in its proper orbit, but now battered and barely recognizable. The other had been reduced to a rapidly-moving fragment orbiting much lower than the other four had been. Even most of the atmosphere had been stripped away.

What had happened? And how? And by what or whom? Those questions raged in Zarthon’s mind, weighing more heavily now than that of the fate of zir erstwhile empire.

How had the Empire disintegrated in just three generations? The answers would likely be hotly debated by historians for generations. What mattered now was that every world ruled by the Empire had thrown off that rule in a seemingly endless succession of violent uprisings. In relatively short order, what had been a vast domain of several hundred worlds scattered through the Galactic Spur and the two Arms that embraced it had shrank to just one, the Homeworld. And now? Even that had been taken, leaving only the passengers and crew of Revenge of Zathras and nine other warships all in orbit.

“Helm,” ze barked, “set a course for the third planet. Relay the order to the other ship Commanders. Then break orbit, sublight drive.”

“At once, Syr!”

* * *

Zarthon flollopped out of zir ready-room, coming to rest at zir command chair. “Report!”

“Approaching the planet, Syr.”

“Display it.”

An image of the third planet, Yardithzr, and its lone moon leaped into existence. Ze recognized the world's continental configuration. It at once put zir mind at ease and unsettled zir spirit. Part of zir had wanted to hope for a navigational error, that the Homeworld had not, after all, been rent asunder. But the presence of Yardithzr confirmed their location in the Core System.

“Syr,” said the First Officer, “are you sure this is a good idea?”

“The survival of our race totters on the blade of a laser-knife.”

“None would dispute that, Supreme Commander. But your proposed approach...”

Zarthon glared. “The Homeworld did not destroy itself, Subcommander,” ze spat. “No, the denizens of this world must have done it. And we will hold them responsible by subduing them utterly.”

The Subcommander gazed back stonily, but said nothing.

The only hope lay ahead, at the end of an insertion orbit. Hope, and revenge.

“Signal the other ships to commence Phase One,” ze commanded.


	2. The Second Wave

So it was that life returned to normal. Or so we thought. Little did we realize the symmetry between what we had all endured and the Viking invasion of Lindisfarne in the eighth century.

In those days, for those of my readers who may have neglected their history, or perhaps live across the Pond and have, for reasons that continue to baffle the likes of myself, forgotten that part of their heritage, raiders from Scandinavia had rowed ashore on the eastern coast of Northumbria, attacked and sacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, and then left as suddenly as they had arrived, bearing off treasures and slaves and leaving the monastery in flaming ruin.

Little had the people then known, that the Northmen were to return, seeking fortune, fame, and land. They had overrun nearly all of England in the late ninth century when one man, Aelfred king of Wessex and later all England, had repelled the Danes and eventually driven them back out of Britain.

So it was with the Martians. As that fateful summer gave way to autumn, cooling rains drenched what fires we could not ourselves extinguish. Over the ensuing months, whenever we went riding in the countryside near the tracts of scorched pine forest, we could see the occasional wisps of light smoke rising from the ground where trees or houses or barns had blazed so intensely in the summer heat.

Those many people who had been driven from their homes returned. Most of them, at any rate. Many, of course, had been killed by the Martians. Some others had died from accidents upon the road, or of injury or sickness afterward for want of adequate medical care. Those whose homes had been destroyed by the invaders moved in temporarily with relatives or neighbors.

Over winter, the snows covered the land, softening the sharp edges of the pits where the empty cylinders still lay. Gone were the Martian devices and their bodies, all carted off in the weeks following their defeat, for examination by British scientists of their various disciplines. Gone were the charred bodies of the slain, likewise carried away for identification and later given good Christian burials.

Dismantling and clearing of the wreckage in Woking, London, and the surrounding area proceeded apace, some of the work knocking off when the snows became so deep as to be an impediment to good labor. Despite, in some instances, the protestations of the owners of a home or business, who most strenuously insisted on getting their lives back in order, and quite understandably so.

The dry husks of the red weed that had so choked our waterways and forests had disintegrated and fallen into humus, been trampled into the dust of road or field, or washed downstream eventually into the sea. Only the fibrous cores of the most robust stems remained to mark where it had once grown so luxuriantly, some bits and pieces still clinging tenaciously to tree bark in some places.

By All Hallow’s Eve, all the damaged rail line had been repaired, the old heat-warped rail hauled off to the ironworks to be melted down and re-cast. In fact, by Christmas, one could almost disbelieve that anything unusual had happened at all, attributing all of the lingering damage to the various kinds of accidents that are always a part of civilised life in southern England.

One only had to but look into the eyes of anyone who had lived through it, seen the tripods lumbering about, witnessed the terrible Heat-Ray, fled the Black Smoke, or toiled through the jungle of red weed, to know that true horrors had been perpetrated upon England and, I would later learn, many other places in the world.

But as with the Vikings, so also with the Martians. As the snows of winter gave way to the first snowdrops, bluebells, and daffodils of spring, the first object of what would prove to be a second wave fell from the sky.

* * *

Zarthon half-hung in the microgravity of geosynchronous orbit, tethered to zir command chair and peering at images and data scrolling across the main display. Ze snorted.

Pressing some of the Alnedrin slaves into service for Phase One had been a brilliant idea, if ze could say so zirself. True, they weren't exactly expendable. Not anymore. Nor, for that matter, was anything else aboard any of the fleet's ships. But they were still just slaves, barely capable of whatever it was they did, and they’d served their purpose beautifully. So it was really no great loss that they had all perished on the planet's surface. They'd discovered the capabilities of the natives, showed their strengths and weaknesses, and bruised them a little in the process. And, of course, kept concealed the true nature of Zarthon's people.

Still, the situation required great caution. With Phase 1, Zarthon had expended the all-critical Element of Surprise. Yet with that, ze had secured crucial knowledge of the natives' behavior and their capabilities. As a race, they would almost make a worthy adversary. Almost. Yet a few unsettled questions nagged at zir mind.

First was the problem of gravity, so much greater on this world than on zir own. Exosuits only addressed mechanical mobility. Effects on physiology would prove another problem, one that would have to be solved within the first generation if zir race was to continue living on Yardithzr.

Second was the matter of the mysterious deaths of the Alnedrinae. In a matter of just a few rotational periods, every one of them had sickened and died from as-yet unknown causes. Every plan to retrieve one of the bodies for examination had encountered insurmountable problems.

Third, ze recalled the arcane tales of a previous attempted conquest in the distant past. The details of that defeat had been shrouded in the usual mystery, the accounts recorded in the old texts confusing and contradictory.

Yet failure was not an option.

“Signal the other ships to commence Phase Two,” ze commanded.

* * *

At once, we knew something was different about the second wave. The Martians as we had first known them looked, in many respects, rather like a blobfish married to a squid. The other details have been thoroughly documented by both myself and others.

The objects that fell to Earth in the second wave were reported to look somewhat like inverted rutabagas, their wide ends plunging into the ground and their tapered ends rising some three stories above the berms thrown up by their impacts. In every respect, they hit us harder. They came in greater numbers by an order of magnitude.

The first landed on a remote mountainside in the Scottish highlands. The same day, a second came down in Snowdonia in northwestern Wales. A third hit the waters just off Orkney. A fourth smote the center of Manchester, a fifth and sixth in seemingly random sites in Ireland, another in Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, and at least another dozen spread out across England.

Over the following week, we counted eighty-seven confirmed Cones, as they'd quickly come to be called. Another possible thirteen had either fallen at sea or had for one reason or another not survived the impact. And there had not been a corner of Britain not so inflicted.

The Army had managed to shell over a dozen of them. But those that had fallen in more remote areas had escaped our otherwise timely military response. Unlike the cylinders, which had lain in their impact pits for a day before doing anything, the Cones had opened within three hours of impact, their tapered ends peeling open like immense, metallic lilies, the heat-scale flaking away from their hulls in the process, and immediately unleashed the Heat-Ray.

And not only England. France, Spain, Iceland, Norway, and so on. Countries that had been spared the first wave found themselves facing the brunt of an attack an order of magnitude greater than what I myself had witnessed, but without the knowledge we English had already gained.

In the absence of summer heat, the fires set by the Heat-Ray were far less severe. Except, perhaps, for places around the Mediterranean and in Africa and the Southern Hemisphere where it was getting on into autumn and where, I was later to learn, the damage, while much like what we English had experienced in the first wave, was far more extensive and far more severe.

I will spare my readers those details and defer to witnesses in those other places in the world who have written down their own accounts in accordance with their own experiences and through their own eyes and their own perspectives. As for those here in England, I shall here be brief, for the newspapers have covered the events in much greater breadth and depth—and, arguably, objectivity--than before.

Manchester burned completely by fires ignited by the Cone's impact and by the Heat-Ray. The resulting wreckage greatly impeded the ability of the military to move their guns into position.

At three of the other impact sites, the military managed to shell the Cones before they could open and disgorge their terrible cargo. In Scilly, the ironclad HMS _King Aelfred_ bombarded the southern end of Tresco, destroying one of the two Cones that had landed there.

The sites in Snowdonia, the Scottish Highlands, the Welsh Brecon Beacons, and the Isle of Man proved too remote to bring artillery to bear and the site off Orkney had not been discovered until much later when the ironclad HMS _Owain Glyn Dwr_ pounded the Martian compound erected on the island.

Of that, I later saw photographs showing the absolute ugliest thing I have ever seen, a sort of metallic brier patch of very large, dangerously wicked-looking spikes sticking out of the ground at odd angles. As one might expect, bombardment was of limited effectiveness, at least initially. It should, I suppose, go without saying that no dirigible could approach to within a mile without being immediately destroyed by the Heat-Ray.

I’d heard, though little more than rumor, that a night raid in near-total darkness had also failed miserably. Out of two hundred men, only seven had survived their retreat.

Even as all of Britain had mounted a military response, debate among the academics had already erupted. Some proposed that the first wave had been sent to soften us up. Others insisted that it had been meant to establish a beach-head. Sill others, that it had been an expeditionary force for the purpose of evaluating our strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities. Those I most respected had believed it to have been all three and with them I had been inclined to agree, a position have not abandoned to this day.

While the cylinders had lain there for days while the Martians inside built their first tripod using metal they'd smelted out of the earth, each Cone had disgorged a full half-dozen tripods, having descended folded up inside.

These were also somewhat larger and had a coarser-looking appearance, standing an additional half-dozen yards taller, the hoods broader and more oblong in shape, and the legs jointed into three segments, giving them a more insectoid appearance than the tripods employed in the first wave. As with the earlier ones, metallic tentacles dangled from beneath and on occasion grasped objects and stowed them inside cargo containers aft of the hoods. Also as with the earlier ones, these bore the fearsome Heat-Ray. Though some observers noticed that the path of the ray could sometimes be discerned if the ambient humidity were high enough, especially when foggy or misty conditions prevailed. Also, an altogether different kind of Smoke weapon was deployed, this one self-diffusing, reacting with any and all organic compounds to form an otherwise innocuous salt.

The creatures themselves were wholly unlike the first Martians. They bore three limbs so arranged as to afford mobility both on the ground and on vertical surfaces. Some witnesses reported these things could maneuver upside down, crawling like spiders. Three-fingered hands could apparently grasp and manipulate tools, though no one had, to my knowledge, ever observed them doing so. Though they must have, in order to build and operate their great machines.

Whereas the first wave had blown itself out in a matter of only a month, leaving but minor damage in the grand scheme of things, the second wave lasted four months. These creatures we found to be just as easily killed as the blobfish Martians. But unlike those, they had not succumbed to our germs, at least not fatally. Mostly, it had been changes in military tactics that had gained us victory.

We had taken some three dozen of these Martians as prisoners. All had later died in captivity, and for various reasons. Leading theories suggested germs had weakened them, but they had mostly died of things like malnutrition, organ failure, and physical trauma from rough handling by their captors.

What we learned from these had also taught us much. Unlike the previous ones, which lacked anything that could be identified as digestive systems, these possessed organs somewhat analogous to those of Terrestrial life. Stomach, intestine, several organs that performed the functions of our own liver, kidney, spleen, and so forth, but also others which purposes we could only guess. Small four-chambered hearts pumped their copper-based blood, and their brains, while also small, were clearly capable of high-level functioning. They could not sweat, and so their mechanism for temperature regulation remained a mystery. Their eyes possessed the same range of sight as those of the blobfish Martians, though their hearing was more acute than ours and they bore long skin dimples analogous to a fish’s lateral lines.

The wreckage these new Martians inflicted on England was estimated to be proportional to what had been recorded of the ninth-century Danish invasion of England. Whole towns were incinerated, their residents killed, abducted, or scattered. Fields and livestock were either razed or ignored, seemingly at random. The scale of damage to infrastructure nearly crippled England. But we rebuilt, albeit with markedly less energy than the time before.

* * *

Zarthon glared at the data scrolling across zir display. The plan should have worked. Not the first phase, of course. That had been a test of sorts, and part of standard procedure for planetary conquest. But against such a woefully underdeveloped life form, the second phase should have been more than adequate. Clearly, ze had underestimated them. They learned so much faster than expected! Odd, though, since ze had pets with greater intelligence. But they were tough, at least as a whole. But they could be and would be broken. And then they would be strong slaves and sustainable food.

Ze grinned. Never, in the history of the Empire, had any world withstood an assault by Tlingan shock troops.

“Signal the other ships to begin Phase Three!”


	3. A Shattered World

The third wave, however, was far worse in all respects. The Martians sent Cubes, more than a hundred of them, each one six times the size of a Cone. In late January the year following the Second Wave, they came straight down in streaks of orange fire, bright smokeless flame wrapping around their edges.

These Cubes and their contents differed from the Cones as those had differed from the cylinders. The Heat-Ray smote out from the units set into the sides of the Cubes, its path a faint, but visibly discernible, beam of chartreuse. Despite their size, we managed to shell exactly one of them, and that only because it had come down not two hundred yards from a military artillery firing range. A half dozen others we only damaged before our guns were smitten by the Heat-Ray.

Out of each one poured not only a full two dozen tripods, but scores of soldiers. Rank upon rank of them.

The tripods, like the ones before, carried the Heat-Ray, the Black Smoke launchers, and articulated metal tentacles which they employed to grasp all manner of objects. But these were larger and courser in all respects, save for the way they moved, which was almost an organic lope that might have been beautiful if not for the terrible carnage unleashed. Three cylindrical toes supported the legs like the base of the cypress trees that grow in America. The legs were almost tenticular themselves. The hood resembled the carapace of some long-extinct crustacean and the front of the machine bore what looked like blazing demonic eyes that peered hellishly out from beneath the hood like a crawfish or a nautilus. And the noise it made, like a malevolent foghorn, struck fear into the hearts of all who heard it.

Their soldiers were worse, if one could believe it. They stood at least eight feet tall, and walked on two legs put together like a dog's hind legs, but with two toes bent backward such that they appeared to walk on their knuckles, though I am quite sure this was not the case. They had two arms and three fingers which gripped in one hand a small cylinder bearing something that looked like a sword blade made of pure light, and in the other what looked like a blunderbuss that spouted sparks of some yellow-hot molten substance. Their large, black eyes were utterly soulless even in life, and they had no noses or mouths that anyone could see.

Years later, it became known via examination that these were some sort of biomechanical suit. The suit aided a much smaller, physically frail creature that could have operated in our gravity only slightly more effectively than the first wave's blobfish Martians. These also bore the same black, soulless eyes, but had four nostrils and what looked to us to be a lipless mouth. In the last years of the Occupation, several were taken prisoner and studied. But alas, the conclusions were never, to my knowledge, released to the public as general knowledge. Suffice it to say that, apparently, attempts to communicate failed as completely as ever.

* * *

I stood near the bow of the frigate HMS _Siege of Harlech_ , looking toward New York City. Hundreds of my countrymen and women crowded the upper deck. Most of them directed their attention forward.

I could just see the Statue of Liberty poking her torch above the near horizon. Around me spread a flat, slate grey sea, broken only by a pair of bow waves from the ship. Astern stretched hundreds of refugee ships full of people without a land searching vainly for a land without a people.

Someone began to sing.

Oh, the year was seventeen seventy-eight

Another picked up the song.

How I wish I was in Sherbrook now  
A letter of marque came from the king to the scummiest vessel I've ever seen

Soon, dozens were singing along.

Goddamn them all!  
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold  
We'd fire no guns, shed no tears  
I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett's privateers...

How I came to be there was still muddled up in my mind. The day the Martians of the First Wave died, all of England had rejoiced. I'd found myself attached, by virtue of having been one of the few eyewitnesses to most of the invaders' campaign, and by way of a convoluted string of social and professional connections, to Oxford University as a technical writer for the scientists overseeing studies of the dead Martians and their technology.

Oh, the things we had learned! But in those days, we had no idea that what we had endured had been but the tip of a very large and terrible iceberg. We’d thought we’d won, though through no virtue of our own. We could not have been more wrong.

One thing had led inexorably to another and to make a long story--otherwise well-documented in various journals including my own--short, England had been abandoned, evacuated in what, I am sure, had been conceived by some minister or other to have been a well-ordered withdrawal. Which had, of course, quickly disintegrated into a general stampede and ended in utter pandemonium.

Thousands of ships of all classes, some of questionable seaworthiness, others little more than the sorts of boats that had brought Duke William and his conquering Normans across the Channel back in 1066, pulled people and whatever they could carry on their backs, off of Britain’s shores while our Army valiantly and desperately defended the civilians against the Martian advance.

As the shores of Cornwall were patrolled by tripods, there had been none of the proverbial weathering of the lizard. Every captain who had tried had surely regretted it, his vessel disabled and sunk by the Heat-Ray, the survivors plucked from the cold water by equally cold tentacles. I still shudder when I think of those poor wretches who should have preferred hypothermia to a grizzly fate at the hands of the Martians.

Many of the smaller vessels put ashore in France, not knowing at the time that it, too, was being overrun. Others struck out in any direction her skipper deemed most likely of survival. Some sailed across the North Sea toward Scandinavia, others toward Iceland or Greenland, others to Spain or the Atlantic islands of the Azores or the Canaries. I am given to understand that some arrived safely in Brazil and Argentina, the Caribbean, South Africa, and India. But of those, I heard only rumor, and even that after a very long time.

Of the fate of the Royal Family, I have heard conflicting news. Some have said that the Queen died en route from London to Southampton, others that she later arrived in a weakened state in South Africa and died shortly thereafter. Of Prince Edward, nothing was ever heard.

The _Siege of Harlech_ had sailed, with seven hundred other ships, directly toward America. Scores of these had never arrived. Following a fierce storm we had encountered en route, a number of ships had vanished. Others, I have been told, had hit icebergs, or had gone off course never to be seen again. A few had, many years later, been discovered lodged in the ice of what had once been explored as the fabled Northwest Passage, or wrecked on the shores of South Carolina, Florida, or various Caribbean islands.

I brought my mind back to the present as the first buildings of the city came into view. Beside me, my wife squeaked. “My God,” she half-whispered.

Even before setting eyes on it, the distinctive tang of charred wood came my nose on the breeze. My carefully-cultivated mental images of a bustling trade hub shattered under the weight of a ghost city.

As far as I could see, nothing moved. Even from that far vantage point, I could see no shipping in the harbor. No smoke rose into the blue sky, no ships steamed about the harbor. No vehicles rolled along the seawalls. No people flitted back and forth. The stacks of the manufactories stood smokeless, many broken off in stubs of jagged masonry.

No, the only things I saw move were birds. Pigeons, gulls, and the like. And the sky, so clear and so blue, so unlike what I had always been told of New York, with its air reportedly like that of London, laden with smoke, ash, and soot from the city's manufacturing.

But the city had been stilled. The rumors held truth and the city's torpor testified to that.

As the Siege drew nearer to Ellis Island, I could see burned-out buildings. It was a sight I knew all too well. Masonry soot-stained from smoke and fire. Many brick-built structures had clearly collapsed, in whole or in part, their ruins just like in London. Between them stood many gaps, presumably once occupied by timber structures completely burned down.

All along the shore, bits of ships protruded from the water. Here an iron smokestack, there a bow, here the tilting deck of an ironclad killed in the shallows, there a stern with its name emblazoned, or a capsized oceanliner laying on its side, a Martian tentacle draped across one section and a tripod leg across another, the ship’s hull stove in at those places. I counted seven foundered ships floating hull-up in the bay.

Bones of men and beasts littered the mud flats, already picked clean by seaside scavengers. Slabs of charred wood bobbed in the water and a film of wood ash floated in drifts. Curls of smoke still rose up from a myriad of places everywhere I looked.

On the shores of the lower bay, Fort Hamilton lay in ruins, the glint of a tripod's hood visible in the rubble, its legs and tentacles draped over a shattered wall amid what a fellow passenger identified as twelve-inch rifled breech-loading guns very much like what we British had deployed against the Martians, particularly in the first and second waves. I was later to learn that the small island just offshore had been Fort Lafayette, lately an ammunitions depot and obliterated by the Martians during the Second Wave.

Over and around it all twined that purplish variant of the Martian red weed we had all come to know and loathe back in England.

I suppose I should not have been terribly surprised. Why should I have expected New York City to have escaped the invasion, when nowhere else on Earth had?

Indeed, every place the _Siege of Harlech_ had visited since sailing from Southampton had felt the touch of the Martian, the sting of their tentacles, the burn of the Heat-Ray, the choke of the red weed. The ports of Ireland, Iceland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia. All scorched, barren, and all but deserted. In a few places, occupying Martians had fired on us with the Heat-Ray, albeit in what seemed to us to be halfheartedly.

Given the most grievous famine the likes of which we had not seen since the Year Without a Summer nearly a century ago, where were we to go, but America? Oh, for certain, some had remained. But gone were all the creature comforts of modern life we had all come to know. All would have to resume life as it had been before the advent of steam-driven industry. Yet I have been reliably informed that all the world has come to the same state. Indeed much of it never knew our modern industry and the associated trappings, and so for so many there has been but little change, with their way of life continuing as it has for centuries before, and doubtless so will for centuries to come.

Slowly, we turned, passing to within a half-mile of Ellis Island. The grand structure that, I am told, had once stood there had burned to the ground. It had not been rebuilt, and I soot deposits still showed on the monument’s massive pedestal between the vines of a violet-tinged variant of the red weed. To the island’s west, only a few brick buildings still stood, their walls swathed with scorch marks where the weed had not yet grown.

We finished our turn, and passed two more of our own ships. First the salmon trawler _Loch Lomond_ , one of more than a dozen that had kept us fed during our flight across the sea, then a square-rigged merchant sloop that had lost one mast, then two Norse longships crewed by Icelanders. Behind them steamed the oceanliner _Syren_ , running on a single boiler. People crowded their decks.

Our first officer bellowed at them through his bullhorn to turn around. The other ships’ skippers argued back.

A shout from the ship’s starboard side dew my attention. More voices joined his, filled with alarm and despair. From somewhere beyond Ellis Island, the distinctive form of a tripod appeared. It sloshed through water deep enough to obscure the machine’s feet. Though the legs sank at least a third of the way into the water, the hood still towered over everything.

It came on, water surging around the legs in white, roiling foam. The tripod moaned its deep, booming growl.

People screamed. An alarm klaxon rang out and the ship’s bosun began barking orders. Civilians cleared the deck, scrambling below as fast as could be. Which was apparently not good enough for the bosun, who soon let loose a barrage of profanity the likes of which I had seldom heard. Which, of course, did next to nothing to hurry the process.

 _Siege’s_ deck shuddered as her engines growled to life, stacks belching darker smoke from the whale oil burned in place of the coal that had run out long ago. Her aft gun spoke, the boom thuddering through the decking, and another plume of water splashed near the tripod.

A second tripod appeared on land, striding through what remained of a forest that had been partly cleared by man, the job all but finished by the Martians. A third appeared out of the city’s wreckage, striding between the shells of buildings, kicking them aside like toys.

Our other ships had already begun to come about. The smaller ones, of course, completed their turns sooner, the two longships with their four dozen oarsmen almost out of the bay again and _Loch_ overtaking _Siege_.

A faint white line, a Martian’s Heat-Ray, lanced out and hit _Loch_ in the bow. Flame leaped up from her deck, her sail caught fire, and steam billowed up from the water on her far side. Her speed lagged and she began to heel over.

 _Siege’s_ stern guns spoke a mighty volley, the sound hammering my ears. Ahead, oars foaming, the longships streaked toward the open sea. To port, _Syren_ poured smoke from her stacks, water roiling up around her and streaming from her bow. Her captain must have realized the danger and futility of attempting a turning within the bay and decided to back out, even at the cost of speed, rather than risk coming within range of the terrible Heat-Ray. Ahead, a pair of American armored cruisers, which I was later told were the USS _Brooklyn_ and USS _Enterprise_ , and one of our own ironclads, HMS _Agincourt_ , converged on our position.

Our guns spoke once more. Then a deck hand grabbed me, shouted something I could barely hear through the ringing in my ears, and roughly hauled me below. For the next half-hour or so, give or take a little, I knew nothing of what transpired outside, save for each time our guns rattled the ship.

At long last, they stopped. When the crew finally let us all topside, the sun hung only four diameters above the horizon and New York was nowhere to be seen. Westward, all I could see was green coastline. I later learned that _Syren_ had been disabled, and all aboard, some three thousand people, presumed taken by the Martians.

More opinion ran rampant. Some said we would eventually prevail and then rebuild. Boston, Chicago, and so on, London eventually.

“Big difference,” others said, “between rebuilding some and rebuilding all. And who would do the work when the hands who might do it are needed elsewhere?”

He had no answer and, quite frankly, neither did I, nor anyone else that I could tell. But it was true. With so many dead, what point was there in rebuilding cities when at most a quarter of heir original populations still lived? What point, when even those people had fled? They could, in theory, move back, but to what point and purpose? Simply because they could?

The more I listened, the more I thought, and the more I conversed with my wife and my brother, the more I became convinced that the world was never to return to the way it had been before the Martian. No, we would have to make something entirely new, and even that presumed that we could survive this new Occupation.

As the sun sank into the west, our fleet sailed on to God alone knew where. Astern, a lone voice sang out.

Westward from the Davis Strait it's there 'twas said to lie  
The sea route to the Orient for which so many died  
Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered broken bones  
And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones

Others quickly picked up the song.

Ah, for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage  
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea  
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage  
And make a northwest passage to the sea....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Barrett's Privateers" and "Northwest Passage" are both written by Stan Rogers in 1977 and 1981 respectively. But if the songs had existed at the turn of the twentieth century, they surely would have been sung by the people fleeing Britain.


	4. The Bridge of the Gods

Colonel Andronikus Flatiron peered down at a table on which lay a hand-drawn map held down at each corner by a fist-sized piece of andesite rock. He mentally translated semi-concentric lines into the area's topography, and various symbols into intended weapons emplacement, the sketchy road that ran along the southern side of the Columbia River Gorge, the remnants of the town of Cascade Locks, and the Martian fortress across the river.

He shoved a last piece of pemmican into his mouth and chewed pensively. He chased it down with a small bit of dark chocolate acquired via supply chains the nature of which was above his pay grade, as they said. He followed that with a sip from a still-warm stoneware mug, relishing the tang of half-chicory, half-coffee.

He considered the map a final time, and exhaled heavily, his breath coming out in a great cloud in the cool late May air. Well, this operation wasn't going to run itself. He drained his mug, and set it carefully beside the map before turning to gather his gear.

“Bon matin, Colonel.”

Flatiron nearly started. He turned and looked straight into a pair of brown, almond eyes set in a high-cheeked, light-brown face.

He nodded. “Morning, Miz LeConte. I didn't see you there.”

Merofled LaConte smiled. “If you did, that would be sloppy of me, oui?”

Flatiron returned the smile. “It's why we hired you.”

She nodded. “It so happens that the position gives me a good opportunity to kill Martians.”

“You were doing a mighty fine job of that on your own, as I recall. Also why we hired you.”

He let the personal matters pass unspoken between them.

“Are you still up to the plan?” he asked.

“Absoluement.”

He exhaled through his nose in a white cloud. “If you get yourself killed, I'll tan your hide myself,” he said sternly.

She smiled thinly and batted her eyelashes. “Je t'aime aussi,” she said through clenched jaw.

Merofled spun on her heel and half-stalked, half-glided out into the dawn sunlight streaming between storm-stunted noble fir trunks in streamers of fog.

He watched her go, trying not to notice the way her hips moved half-hidden beneath her superbly-affected camouflage. A few dozen steps away, she stopped, nearly vanishing, and looked over her shoulder. She winked at him, then promptly vanished into the forest.

For a dozen heartbeats, Flatiron gripped the table's edge with a gloved hand. No, there was no time for a cold shower, dammit. And the damned Martians weren't going to kill themselves, not this time.

* * *

The next morning came as a copy of the previous one. Gloves in hand, he walked out from cover, a sprig of greenery in his hat scraping on the underside of a single sheet of canvas dyed the now-standard Army Camouflage random green-brown-mustard pattern over which stretched a piece of netting on which bits of fir, lichen, and other random forest detritis had been strewn.

Several yards away, Ruckel Creek trickled free and clear over a riffle on its way toward the Columbia River. He looked up at the sound of footsteps crunching through forest duff still soggy from the night’s dew and a recent spring thaw.

A man in the new uniform of the United States Army stopped outside the tent and saluted, rank insignia in black embroidered on a dull green patch sewn to slightly baggy sleeves. The shirt was tucked into a pair of trousers cinched with a brown leather belt, cuffs tucked into well-scuffed knee-high brown leather boots. The cloth was dyed mottled green, brown, and a little mustard-yellow that blended well with the vegetation in most places. Instead of epaulets, loops of fabric allowed sprigs of local vegetation--noble and Douglas fir, and western redcedar in these parts--to be tied. A wide-brimmed hat, semi-floppy, also had loops sewn in from which protruded multiple sprigs of fir. The uniform that people like Merofled LaConte had helped create.

“Corporal,” said Flatiron with a nod.

“Sir.” The man saluted.

“Dammit, Corporal, you don't have to salute. Let's go.”

“Yessir.”

Flatiron stepped out into the mist. A dozen steps away stood several A-frame tents, all in Army Camo. Similar clusters were scattered across the Benson Plateau, always concentrated beneath the densest patches of forest canopy and always camouflaged.

He almost missed the old days. For men like himself, the new procedures still felt alien. No orderly rows of white canvas neatly at attention like the men who pitched them out in the middle of some wide open field. No cook-fires sending a dozen columns of pale wood smoke into the clear air. No Union blue, no brass rank insignia. Just camouflage, site-specific camp layout, meals ready-to-eat, and the small kerosene-fueled stoves invented by Professor Albert Wickwire at Ft. Custer, the installation built in southern Nevada shortly after the First Wave to study the Martians and their technology. Truth be told, he'd come to like it that way.

As he strode toward the edge of camp, he consciously shrugged off his misgivings about leaving it all completely unattended. Such a thing would never have been done prior to the Invasion. The only camp robbers of any concern now were the four-legged and two-winged varieties.

He and the Corporal strolled across the forest, veering away from Ruckel Creek and along a small spur ridge. At length, they came to a knob from which the terrain dropped steeply to the Columbia. Between fir trunks, the two of them had a good view of the Martian fortress and some of the surrounding grounds.

He at once regretted the inability to personally command the initiation of the action, annoyed that he was to remain an observer during this phase of the operation. He would have to content himself with the knowledge that his planning had been sufficient. That was another thing that had changed. No more bugling, leading charges, bellowing orders to this unit or that unit. Damned arm-chair commanding, that's what it was.

But it had forced every commander to dispense with the utter waste of lining up young men and mostly-grown boys to be ripped apart by enemy guns, and replace all that with a collection of well-trained and disciplined teams, each authorized and fully capable of making semi-autonomous decisions in the heat of battle.

Of course, no battle plan ever survived first contact with the enemy. Not even when a commander devised contingencies and contingencies to those contingencies. No, all he could do was watch, wait, take notes, and trust his teams to do their jobs.

He pulled out a pad of paper composed of several dozen sheets sandwiched between two pieces of thin wood and bound together with a spiral of copper wire, then a pencil. From his vantage point some three thousand feet above the river, he waited.

Between the steep, forested slopes of the Columbia River Gorge, a broad fan of landslide debris forced the river to a southward bend. On that, the aliens had built one of their fortresses. It had six sides, with walls sixty feet high and three feet thick. Its near-vertical surface sprouted scores of downward-facing spikes. Little information had been gleaned about the composition of the wall. But its texture suggested small gravel mixed with metal. And indeed, reports were that the wall had been poured layer upon layer over many weeks.

All attempts to destroy it using dynamite had failed. Which shouldn't have been surprising after several spring floods had utterly failed to have any effect on it, despite having been laid directly on sand and mud with no apparent foundation that would be recognized as such by modern civil engineers.

To date, no one who had entered had ever come back out. Everything known of the fortress' interior had come from covert observations made by advance reconnaissance from the summit of Table Mtn. and from slightly higher vantage points at the northwestern edge of the Benson Plateau on the southern side of the Gorge. Dirigibles were completely out of the question and the development of an air force based on a fusion of the alien flying machines captured after the first wave and Leonardo DaVinci's plans were still very much in their infancy.

The fortress had three round gates, each composed of overlapping metal plates that slid past one another in a helical pattern. The wall had no towers in the way that European castles and U.S. Army forts had, just a thickening at the vertices. Each vertex supported several gun mounts easily identifiable, even if they hadn't been observed in operation. The Heat-Ray generators, launching tubes for the Black Smoke, both mounted on articulated mechanisms capable of aiming the devices in any direction.

All about the grounds spread a purplish variant of the red weed, this one apparently resistant to whatever had killed its predecessors that had arrived in the previous two waves. It also happened to be highly flammable for reasons that had yet to be determined, but also quickly regrew.

Regular patrols by tripod and flier came and went at predictable intervals at all hours of day or night. The tripods always sloshed through the river, never bothering with the many smaller streams that flowed out of the Cascades through deep ravines to the north and south.

This was Flatiron's target.

Against it, he had several weapons at his disposal: the Micro-Wave developed at Area-51 from reverse-engineered alien technology, and variants on the very old ballista, and trebuchet.

The portable models of the Micro-Wave relied on coils, magnets, and capacitors charged by action of hand-cranks, coupled with various mirrors and lenses, and several other principles that the device's co-developers Dr. Janos Bartok, Professor Albert Wickwire, and Nikola Tesla had rattled off as easily as a shipwright might have described sail systems, or an engineer a steam engine.

Based on the full-sized rail-mounted units powered by steam-engines, the field units were transported in several pieces and assembled on-site, then disassembled afterward. Like every other piece of equipment, the otherwise gleaming brass and copper tubes and fittings had been either wrapped in thin scrap leather, burlap, or blacked with paint and scuffed up.

Regarding the ballista and trebuchet, most of his superiors had laughed. How could Medieval weaponry possibly defeat technologically superior aliens, they asked. Flatiron had immediately countered with the inherent drawbacks of cannon. They were prohibitively heavy, requiring wheels that could not negotiate the rough terrain over which his artillery units were to operate. They required powder to propel their projectiles, certain of which would not withstand the abuse of being blasted out of a cannon, powder which had to be hauled along, kept dry, and protected from unintentional ignition. And they generated a great deal of noise and smoke, both of which would immediately attract attention.

By contrast, merely a quarter of the hardware necessary to build a ballista or trebuchet need be transported from the place of manufacture to the field of operations, the remainder being buildable using timber felled and processed on-site. A few mules could easily do this, he told them. No powder was needed, the force of launch being supplied according to the laws of physical mechanics. Operation of the devices was nearly silent and invisible to an observer, even one as advanced as the aliens.

But the cannon had greater range and much shorter setup time, owing mainly to the need to fell, cut, and shape all the wooden components of the Medieval weapons. Flatiron and Roosevelt had felt the trade-off to be sufficient and they had successfully argued their case.

Flatiron had spread his unit's camp beneath the fir cover on the Benson Plateau where they had spent two weeks felling trees and hand-milling them into the components for the siege weapons, all while keeping one eye on the sky. After that, each team had carried the pieces by hand across rough terrain to assemble them at their designated sites of deployment, split between the Oregon and Washington sides of the Gorge.

So it was that Flatiron had set up two Micro-Wave crews, four trebuchets, and a dozen ballistae, the latter armed with various projectiles employing nitro, magnesium, and viscous oils and tar.

Flatiron flipped down the magnifiers on his goggles, all the metallic parts covered with leather or blacked, and watched the activity below. One of the gates stood wide open, a ramp of fused rock sloping up to it. On it marched a row of people enslaved to harvest the fruits of the Red Weed.

Flatiron cringed inwardly. He'd handled one of those things once, and that had been more than enough. His palms had burned as though he had bathed them in lemon juice or vinegar, and then rubbed hot chilis on them. Even after a thorough scrubbing, they had itched for days. And that had just been the rind! He did not care to think of what might have happened if he had come into contact with the sap.

He hoped the harvesters had gloves, though he would have bet real money that they had to harvest them with bare hands. After all, it was well documented that the aliens ate their slaves, presumably after they could no longer work. Or so said the few escapees over the years. Given what had been learned in the wake of the first two waves, Flatiron did not doubt it.

He set his jaw. Part of President McKinley's standing order was that any enslaved humans were to be rescued.

Behind him, the sun crept upward, its light spilling over the ridge, and falling on his shoulder. Far below, that sunlight had already flooded the gap between the Cascades, revealing a thick blanket of fog that had collected overnight over the Columbia and the lower reaches of the myriad of streams draining into it like grey woolen tendrils he estimated at well over a hundred feet thick.

The good news was that the fog gave his teams had at least an hour, maybe two, to work unobserved. Better yet, the Heat-Ray would be ineffective and the Black Smoke nearly so. The bad news was that so would be the new Micro-Wave weapon—developed at Ft. Custer by Nikola Tesla--against anything below the fog line.

Flatiron glanced at the sun, mentally estimating the time. Not that the Martians employed the twenty-four-hour clock. Whatever they did use, they were quite regular about it.

Which meant the first tripod patrol from downriver should be arriving right about...now.

As if on cue, the deep, bellowing growl from a tripod sounded, reverberating off the Gorge walls. The malevolent sound always reminded Flatiron of what might happen if one were to cross a tuba with a fog horn and give it a severe head-cold, or perhaps what the Gjallarhorn of Norse mythology might sound like. Every time, he felt it in his teeth, this time twinging something in one of his molars.

The tripod gave three blasts, their purpose still a mystery, despite the supposition that it might have something to do with bleeding off the pressure from the mechanisms driving them. And despite more than a decade of study, no one, not even Nikola Tesla, had a solid grasp of the inner workings of a tripod, much less one of their flying machines. At most, they'd gleaned a partial understanding of perhaps half the alien technology.

Flatiron settled his goggles, slid their magnifiers into place, and scanned the surface of the fog where it wrapped around Tanner Ridge.

The trio of blats came again. Then into view sailed three of the tripods, one along each bank of the river and one in the middle. The center one was visible mostly as a disturbance in the mist, the fog roiling about it as it passed. The other two seemed to float above it in the peculiar bobbing motion that was a function of the tripod gait.

Damn, he thought, how the hell are we going to hit that? Though the cephalic component of each of the machines was enormous, the distance shrank them.

On the other hand, the fog would certainly ease the jobs of several of his teams. So shielded from the Heat-Ray, they could do their work largely unobserved. Flatiron estimated they had, at most, two hours before the sun shed enough heat to banish the fog.

Even now, those teams were already at work. Three of them had paddled across the river well upstream under cover of the previous evening's twilight. Each man carried a crossbow with fifty standard bolts, and a dozen explosive bolts, a revolver with fifty rounds in reserve, and a modified version of the Martian side-arm developed at Ft. Custer by Dr. Janos Bartok that everyone called a blaster. In addition, they each carried a dozen standard grenades, a half-dozen incendiary grenades made of low-fired earthenware globes filled with magnesium flakes packed in TNT and kerosene, and five pounds of thermite paste.

Each of those assault teams had six men, about the size of a pre-Invasion artillery crew. Which suited the ballista and trebuchet units perfectly. And, truth be told, it had already proven quite workable for Special Operations. Some, of course, had balked at the idea of storming a Martian stronghold with only eighteen men. But any more than that, and they would just get in each others' way for a variety of reasons.

Many had also balked at the idea of crossbows. True, the rifle had greater range and accuracy, and was easier to handle, load, maintain, and its ammunition was a lot smaller. But it made a lot of noise and produced visible smoke, both of which had been shown many times to attract the attention of the Martians like a dead deer attracted flies.

Even now, those teams were at work beneath the cover of mist. Flatiron did not envy them the task he had ordered them to undertake. They were to eliminate every Martian with extreme prejudice, beginning with those outside the walls, and extract all human prisoners to the nearest elevated stands of forest cover, then use some of the thermite to weld the gates open. All without attracting attention and without being killed by friendly fire. Fortunately, it was unlikely the Martians would attempt to employ the Heat-Ray against those teams at the risk of both setting fire to their crops and of needlessly killing their slaves.

That part of the operation would prove the most difficult. All teams had to time their roles just right.

Just downriver, fire bloomed against a tripod hull. A moment later, the accompanying boom echoed off the walls. The machine lurched as the flame cleared, leaving a plume of smoke trickling up from its side. Ah, that would be the opening salvo, a sort of harpoon fired from one of the ballistae. This one, a wooden shaft with four copper vanes at its tail end, and a triple-bladed heat-hardened iron arrowhead on the other behind which was attached two canisters of barely-stabilized nitro and magnesium flakes.

The game was afoot!

Then another fire erupted over the tripod's carapace, blooming from its fore end, and washing over its face and upper hood. That would be a glass globe filled with a mixture of nitro, magnesium flakes, and kerosene.

A third orange glare flashed somewhere in the fog as another globe smashed into the tripod's leg.

The other two tripods turned toward the first and bellowed. A moment later, fire erupted from the tripod on the far side of the river as crews on the Washington side went to work.

A minute later, the central tripod exploded in a flash of yellow-green, the larger shards briefly visible before the whole thing vanished into the fog. The other two took several more lurching steps before likewise disappearing, the crash and crunch of metal hitting ground reaching Flatiron's ears moments later.

For a long time, nothing much else observable happened. Gradually, the fog began to clear, the uppermost parts of the fortress wall gleaming in the morning sunlight. Fire bloomed against the upper battlements several paces from one of the riverward vertices as one of the larger nitro-and-kerosene filled ceramic globes launched by a trebuchet smashed into it.

Martian footsoldiers—and for all anyone could tell, all the Martians were soldiers—swarmed up from various access points, brandishing hand-held weaponry. Knots of them clustered around the controls for the Heat-Ray and Black Smoke canister launchers on their swivel-mounts.

Flatiron grinned. Without an obvious source for the attack, as would have been the case with powder artillery, the enemy would do nothing, at least initially.

He continued his observations. Even through magnification, the seven-foot-tall aliens still appeared as ants. One of them collapsed as one of the devices nearby burst into a shower of sparks. Another nearby simply exploded, taking out several of its neighbors.

Flatiron laughed out loud. “Two can plat at that game, you bastards!”

More flame erupted in several spots around the fortress' perimeter, some on its walls, some atop fighting platforms, and a few inside the compound.

The lifting fog darkened in places, water mist replaced by smoke and the glow of the fires rapidly spreading through the red weed.

Some of the vegetation on the far side of the river began to burn far up on the hillside as the Aliens brought one of the Heat-Ray batteries to bear at random, apparently hoping to hit one of their attackers. Then a black bloom erupted on another part of the Table Mtn. A billowing cloud of Black Smoke flowed down the mountain's flank toward the river, and toward the assault teams and the rescuees.

* * *

Merofled LeConte crouched at the bow of a cottonwood raft. The water of the Columbia River lapped almost to what passed for a deck.

She would have preferred a birch canoe, if for no other reason than that she was more familiar with that. But cottonwood grew in such profusion in the lowlands of the Pacific Northwest. Also, it was far easier to work, especially given the time constraints and the need to conduct the work quietly. The result was a heavy thing like the ones that had carried wagons down the river back in the days of the Oregon Trail.

They'd needed several of them, and for that reason, her team had arrived on the southern bank of the Columbia two weeks ahead of the main body of the U.S. Army assault force tasked with eliminating the Martian fortress that loomed up in the near-darkness to the west.

Finding downed cottonwood trees had not been difficult. And as luck would have it, they'd also found several cedars and firs killed and partially dried by the Martian Heat-Ray that had razed the small town of Cascade Locks.

Felling those trees using crosscut saws exclusively and without detection had proven a challenge. Every day, a trio of tripods stalked up and down the river and twice, a body of several dozen Martian soldiers marched past along the road. Each time, they'd had to cease work, hastily shove tools beneath slabs of moss or tangles of red weed, and then hide in the mercifully plentiful undergrowth. This had necessitated long shifts, with men working until they could no longer see, and sometimes even after that.

When the first of the artillery crews, a trebuchet team, had arrived, LeConte had personally ferried them across under cover of darkness, with only a waxing crescent moon for light. Two more trips had taken two ballista teams across three days later.

Her own team had launched an hour before, from the bank a few hundred yards upriver from the locks, each raft waiting twenty minutes before launch. And steering those things had been a first-rate pain in the derriere. They'd angled sharply upriver to come aground by Rock Creek on the Washington side.

It took what felt like an hour to unload all their gear, and then re-stow it into pouches, packs, quivers, belts, and so on until she felt like a human porcupine. She remembered having to go through basic training in full gear, spewing profanity under her breath the whole time. Even during the Lakeview Operation late last fall, that training had paid off.

When the moon had begun to shed enough light to see, she led her three assault teams away from shore and the eerie blue-green glow of the Martian red weed, and climbed up to a low bench forested with Douglas fir and bigleaf maple with a vine maple and blue elderberry understory. It took them all night to traverse around to the edge of the landslide apron the Martians had denuded to build their fortress and cultivate their red weed crops.

Two dozen yards back from the forest edge, they encountered one of the trebuchet crews. Lieutenant Bill Prouty greeted her with a nod that otherwise would have earned a reprimand. Strictly speaking, LeConte was not in the chain of command, an arrangement that had made for several tense encounters with the regular Army personnel. Half the time, she'd been able to resolve the situation herself. The other half, a superior officer had stepped in. She'd finally earned everyone's respect during the Lakeview Operation after personally slaying more Martians than anyone else.

“Any trouble, Lieutenant?” she asked quietly.

“Nope. No sign they've noticed us, even with all our ruckus.” He cocked a gloved thumb over his shoulder at the trebuchet at rest, its rough-hewn throwing arm standing like a fir snag, and the half-dozen crates of incendiary and high-explosive ammunition beside it. “No change from the reports. Be sure you're out of the way when it's our turn.”

LeConte nodded. “Bien sur.”

She led her teams in another arc toward the base of Table Mtn. When she looked back over her shoulder, the trebuchet team had vanished. Oh, they were still there, of course. But their camouflage was excellent. She should know. After all, she'd personally developed it.

As night wore on, a mist congealed out of the air, diffusing the blue-green glow from the red weed fields, now so bright as to rival a full moon. At length, they stopped at a small lake choked with red weed. She set the watch and settled in for a few hours of shut-eye, laying down on a patch of needle duff with her back against a fir trunk.

The next thing she knew, someone was shaking her awake. A greying pre-dawn twilight merged with the glow. The mist had condensed into a thick fog that cut through her clothing and right to the bone. She shivered involuntarily.

“That bad?” her rouser asked.

She chuckled. “I will never get used to the damp. When this war is over, I should retire to California.”

Corporal Smith chuckled. “And start a winery?”

She glared at the man, but said nothing. She climbed to her feet, rushed to the edge of camp, and threw up.

“Ma'am?” said Smith. “Are you...?”

“C'est rien,” she said curtly. Of course, it wasn't nothing. Far from it, in fact. But that would have to wait for a while.

After spitting a little and gargling with a swallow of woefully watered-down chardonnay, he pulled out an acorn flour cake from her pack and gnawed it down, chewing vigorously. She checked and re-checked her equipment, then followed the cake with another pemmican bar before the crews dispersed, each bound for a different gate. Her target was the one facing northeast.

The other crews vanished into the forest. Her own team remained invisible until they moved. She took a few moments to go over the plan before climbing up away from the lake and toward the field's edge. One by one, the five of them took up position in a rough arc, each a good twenty feet from the other.

LeConte looked to the right and left, noting the positions of the others in her team. She couldn't see them, of course, even though she was looking right at them. And if she couldn't spot them, there was no way in enfer the Martians could.

Across the field, metal scraped against metal, and the gleaming gate plates drew back to become a gaping black hole. Figures began to emerge. As expected, the smaller, tottering human forms, mostly shorter than six feet in height, appeared first. LeConte counted at least twenty before the first Martian taskmaster emerged. One...two...three...twenty-seven in all, one for every three humans.

She still marveled at them and the awe and terror they inspired. Merde, they were big! At between seven and nine feet tall, they made excellent targets. As slaves and masters spread out over the field, LeConte pulled six raven-fletched arrows and put one to the string, holding the others in ready reserve with his bow hand.

She was the only one with a conventional bow, a recurve that served both in war and the hunt that drew a respectable seventy pounds. She stood several paces back, the broad-headed obsidian hunting point still held groundward.  


She watched the poor people labor at their tasks. Even at that distance, she could see the expressions of pain and fear washed with despair on their faces. And what a miserable existence it was!

She'd handled one of the red weed fruits after the victory at Lakeview. Nasty things they were, with spiky rinds like sycamore balls, but three times the size of a casava melon, and covered in a thin mucilage that irritated human skin worse than anything she'd ever felt. She'd never been so glad to drop any object in her life, and it had still taken hours for the effects to fade, even after a thorough scrubbing with baking soda.

Why the Martians employed the humans and not the handling machines for the harvesting of the insidious fruits, no one knew.

It was all she could do to stay her hand, to hold and await the signal. Which, hopefully, would be audible, because sure as enfer no one could see anything in that soup.

The plan had not allowed for fog. The plan was to begin as soon as most of the humans had left the fortress. The idea being that it would be far easier easier to extract them if they were already outside of the structure. It had worked beautifully at Lakeview.

Then again, Lakeview was not the Columbia River Gorge. There was no fog at Lakeview. And there had been far fewer prisoners. On the other hand, Lakeview had no dense forest cover, either. The approach to the Martian fortress there had been painstakingly slow and under a new moon. There, nearly two miles of open, completely exposed ground had lain between the fortress and anything even remotely resembling forest or terrain cover. And across that, they had had to move every person and piece of equipment both in and out. Laying down suppression fire during refugee evacuation had been very risky. Even worse, the fires had choked the air with smoke and if the wind had been blowing eastward, the entire escape route would have been cut off.

Fortunately, it seemed that the Martians had bad eyesight. Their suits possessed mechanisms for augmenting vision, but those hardly helped them see in the dark. The tripods, on the other hand, were another matter entirely.

Also fortunately, the risk of accidentally hitting a human was low.

As the sky slowly lightened, LeConte had to resist the urge to fidget. The waiting was always the hardest part of any operation. She watched the people and Martians take up positions and chose her targets, beginning with the nearest. Aim small, miss small, her father had taught her, advice that had served her very well.

Then, when it seemed she could wait no longer, she heard it.

Somewhere downriver, a tripod bellowed its distinctive growling horn. Under the cover of that noise, LeConte drew and loosed, drew and loosed, drew and loosed, six arrows away in half again as many seconds.

Her first arrow slammed into the back of the nearest Martian barely ten yards away. The thing half spun, half staggered about and fired his weapon in LeConte's general direction. The shot went wide and her second arrow pierced its face and it went down.

Her third arrow sank into a Martian's chest, dropping it where it stood. The fourth made a gut wound in a third Martian, the fifth and sixth kill shots.

LeConte swiveled behind a tree trunk and pulled six more arrows. To her left and right came the slow, rhythmic _TUNG...TUNG...TUNG_ of the crossbows. Above it, the staccato, shrieking shrill of Martian weapons fire.

Enemy blaster fire tore through the foliage, shattering small branches and knocking chunks of bark off of tree trunks. Most of it went too high, or too wide. A few shots came within a few feet.

She peeked out from behind his tree, and spun back out. _THRUM-SMACK! THRUM-SMACK! THRUM-SMACK!_ Two more Martians fell by her hand.

In the space of thirty seconds, all twenty-seven Martians had been killed. Several of them had taken multiple hits, arrow fletchings or bolt vanes standing up from their bodies.

For several heart-beats, nothing moved. The people stood and stared. Thin tendrils of smoke curled up from a fir sapling. Downriver, one of the tripods bellowed. Then something in that direction exploded.

LeConte stepped out of the foliage and gesticulated frantically in the general direction of the trebuchet crew. “ _ALLEZ! ALLEZ! ALLEZ!_ ” she yelled.

The first person, a young woman, grabbed a child by the hand and started running. A bolt of blaster fire zipped past her. That was all it took. The rest dropped whatever they carried, found some strength somewhere, and began to run northeastward.

LeConte looked toward the fortress. Three Martians stood in the door, firing at the people. She gaged the distance, then pulled an incendiary arrow, put it to the string, heaved back, and loosed. It fell several yards short, burst into flame, and set the red weed on fire. Dense smoke wafted up.

She pulled her own blaster, a heavy pistol-like weapon developed at Ft. Custer after studying captured Martian technology after the first two waves, and fired back toward the open door. Three shots, then she moved two yards, and squeezed off three more. And so on, never firing more than three times from the same place.

Her first salvo hit one of the Martians in the face. Its head burst like a melon and it collapsed. Three rounds from her team hit another in the chest.

A moment later, the expected backup arrived on the other side of the door. Blaster fire began to rain down from the top of the wall.

A blaster round caught a fleeing woman in the shoulder, knocking her to the ground. A nearby man staggered over to her, tripped, and barely recovered enough to heave her to her feet. Another lifted one of the fallen Martian blasters and turned it on the fortress. A bolt caught him in the belly and spilled him onto the ground. Another person picked it up and began firing from a kneeling position.

A ball of fire from an incendiary bolt bloomed in the chest of one of the Martians. Fire wrapped around it. For several moments, the creature barely noticed. Then it staggered about and fell backward into the fortress.

A moment later, fire erupted at the upper edge of the wall, and washed over several of the Martians. It dribbled down the face and fell onto the ones gathering at the door. Something atop the wall exploded, and a fireball rose into the air.

The flames consuming the red weed continued to expand, belching acrid smoke into the air. LeConte and her team continued to pour blaster fire through the smoke and into the open door and the enemy continued to fire back, their shots still missing wildly.

Downriver, something else exploded, the boom reverberating off the gorge walls.

Off to the left, the vegetation at the forest edge burst into flame. The flame spread, twigs snapping, wet wood exploding, fir needles blazing into flame.

“Merde! Heat-Ray!” she yelled.

She turned her attention to the nearest wall vertex and squeezed off three rounds at it. She moved two more yards and fired at the adjacent vertex. More fire bloomed on the wall's face. Flame rose up and burning liquid dripped down onto the red weed and caught that on fire.

Something exploded atop one of the vertices and the Heat-Ray progression stopped. More flame sprang to life on the upper wall. Something barely seen whooshed in from the northeast. Ceramic shattered at the door and the whole area went up in flame. Martians screamed their ear-splitting shriek, tall figures windmilling about before collapsing.

Somewhere in the middle of the field, something shattered. A cloud of the Black Smoke roiled up.

“Merde!” LeConte shoved her blaster back into its holster, pulled another incendiary arrow, and lobbed it into a high arc in the direction of the slowly-creeping cloud. Fire bloomed at the cloud's edge, setting another patch of red weed on fire, and eating away at the Black Smoke. That wouldn't completely stop it, of course. But it would slow it down enough for the still-fleeing people to escape and her team to break into the fortress.

By then, she had caught up with the rest of her team, their target door barely visible as a dark slit along the face of the wall, with a hundred yards of burning red weed between them. From somewhere off to to the right, the din of battle at the southwestern gate reached his ear.

The blaster fire from the Martians at the gate had ceased. Nine of them rushed out, pelting across the field in pursuit of the people, the last of whom had plunged into the trees moments before.

LeConte pulled her blaster and opened up on the knot of Martians, joined a heartbeat later by her team. In seconds, the nine lay crumpled on the ground. Presently, more of them poured out.

“How many of those bastards are there?” demanded Private Emmerson.

“Too many!”

“More than at Lakeview?”

“Oui!” said LeConte.

Two of the Martians fired at them.

“Merde!” said LeConte. She shuffled back as a bolt sizzled past her head and took cover behind a fir trunk.

In her peripheral vision, a large, irregular object tumbled through the air, trailing a barely-perceptible tail of smoke.

“En bas!” LeConte yelled, even as she dove to the ground and threw her arms over her head.

Moments later, an explosion shook the earth. _BA-DA-DOOM!!!_ Bits of dirt, rock, red weed, and probably Martian clattered off the tree trunks and bounced off her back. Her ears rang.

She sat up and looked toward the field. Where the mass of Martians had been, a large crater sent smoke and steam into the air. Amid patches of newly-ignited red weed lay pieces of Martian. A few of them still moved, but weakly. Smoke from the red weed mingled with the still-roiling Black Smoke, some of which had been shredded by the explosion into concentrations weak enough to be rendered inert by what remained of the rapidly-fading fog.

Another explosion atop the wall merged with the din of fighting near the other two gates, more tripod bellowing, and another explosion somewhere downriver.

LeConte pulled her bandanna over her nose, settled her goggles over her eyes, and nodded to her team. As one, they rushed across the grounds, periodically slipping on tendrils of red weed. She barely avoided turning an ankle on one of the fruits. Blaster fire zipped past her. Once, a bolt tore through the rim of her hat.

After what felt like forever, they fetched up against the wall and ran along it under partial cover of the spikes protruding from it. Blaster fire ricocheted off the metal. Twenty paces from the door, she pulled a grenade, bent down to light the fuse on a patch of burning red weed, and lobbed it through the door. The others did the same.

Six explosions peppered whatever was inside the door with shards of flying ceramic, iron filings, and rapidly-burning magnesium chips. For good measure, she pulled a stick of dynamite, lit the fuse, and lobbed that through the door, too. Moments later, it exploded.

She pulled three arrows and put one to the string, then half hopped, half rolled onto the ramp and into a kneeling position. Her teammates took up position alongside her.

Inside the door, a Martian crawled across the floor, and reached up to a panel. The door plates began to slide together.

“The doors!” said Emerson.

“Thermite!” said Corporal Pez.

They each pulled out a slug of thermite paste and jammed it against the edges of the plates. Emerson jumped down and grabbed a burning stick and held it to the thermite until it caught. They stood back and let it sizzle. But the door continued to close.

“Damn,” said Pez.

Emerson stepped through the door and brought his boot down hard on the fallen Martian's head. It crunched like a pumpkin and the thing went limp. The man peered at the panel, then tapped at it. The door plates ground to a halt.

“Since when do you read Martian?” Pez demanded.

“I studied,” Emerson said.

“Argue later,” said LeConte.

“How are we going to keep the door open?” Pez asked.

Emerson pulled out his blaster.

“No, wait...”

Emerson discharged his weapon at point-blank range. The panel erupted in a shower of sparks and went dark.

“Dammit, Private...”

“But we're here to destroy it all,” Emerson protested.

“Enough,” said LeConte. “For now, we must find and rescue prisoners. And then destroy the fortress.”

“And kill Martians in the meantime!” Emerson nearly let out a Rebel Yell.

LeConte put an incendiary arrow to the string and turned her attention to the interior. Despite its appearance from outside, the inside was brightly-lit. Panels on the walls gave off a blue-white glare. Far overhead, a domed roof was also peppered with the same light-giving panels interspersed with what looked like skylights. Beyond the door's threshold and the associated carnage, the floor was clean, gleaming like polished marble, but a strange light grey.

“I hate these guys,” said Emerson.

“Who doesn't?” said Pez.

LeConte didn't blame them. As expected, the place looked exactly like the fortress at Lakeview. To the right and left, vertical tunnels led straight up. Beyond the cavernous space, more tunnels led horizontally into the bowels of the complex. Catwalks on second and third floors looked out onto the space. Racks, cabinets, fittings, and other objects LeConte recognized but still couldn't identify sat near the walls, were attached to them, or hung from the ceiling. Symbols emblazoned on the walls in a sickly green hue identified things of which LeConte had little idea. Assuming the layout was the same, and neither she nor Colonel Flatiron had any reason to think otherwise, the holding cells should be toward the left.

A thud sounded from above and the building shook. Martian screams filtered down through the vertical tunnels, then stopped. Another thud boomed in the cavernous space, and an explosion blew out two of the skylights, glass-like material raining down to shatter on the floor.

Rapid footsteps approached from one of the tunnels.

“Ready,” said LeConte. She flattened herself against a wall and drew, adjusting the angle to compensate for the weight of the incendiary head. A Martian emerged and LeConte loosed. Her arrow flew past the leader and hit another. The device exploded, scattering bits of foul-smelling flesh and other biomass in all directions.

Pez lit and lobbed a stick of dynamite down the tunnel. It exploded.

Ten seconds later, a dozen Martians lay dead or dying on the floor and walls. Several of the light panels had been damaged.

“Allons-y!” said LeConte.

* * *

Nearly three thousand feet below his position, Flatiron watched the vanishing fog gradually reveal the battlefield like a slow Christmas morning. Without the magnification, the two-plus-miles shrank everything to a very annoyed ant hill tormented by an unruly child. With it, everything changed.

Smoke from the burning red weed continually shifted, obscuring a part of the field one moment, then revealing it the next, only to promptly block it again. Already, a light easterly breeze began to stir, gently nudging the flames and their smoke in the general direction of the charred ruins of Portland many miles downriver.

Fire continued to bloom intermittently atop the fortress wall, now choked with charred and broken Martian bodies, some still weakly moving. One of the Heat-Ray emplacements still functioned, though probably not for long. Little moved on the grounds between the fortress and the river, save for the flames rapidly consuming the red weed, the intermittent explosions from bursting fruits, and the occasional glimpse of a refugee making his or her way through the vegetation along the river's edge.

On both sides of the Gorge, lazy fires burned stripes up the hillside through vegetation still soggy from winter and spring. Where the red weed had found water, those fires burned more energetically, exhausting themselves quickly, and leaving trails of smoke on their way up the many streams that trickled out of the mountains.

A Martian Heat-Ray had, quite accidentally, found the trebuchet emplacement on the Washington side. The fireball from exploding ammunition had gone up like a signal flare and left a sizable hole in the forest canopy. On the Oregon side, it was hard to tell. Drifting smoke and Army camo made observation difficult at best.

Every so often, tripods continued to arrive from east and west. Teams immediately opened fire on them. Tripod wreckage had already created a set of nascent rapids near the riverbank just out from Tanner Ridge, and again several hundred yards upriver of the locks. Smoke still trickled through holes in a couple of the carapaces.

As he watched, fire erupted from a tripod's face. It kept going straight, tentacles flailing. It stumbled onto the far bank, tripped on the fortress, and smashed into the far wall. A moment later, it exploded, shredding everything within a hundred-yard radius.

More fire bloomed from a second tripod's leg. It lurched to a halt, overbalanced, and toppled over. Large cottonwood branches and alder trunks cartwheeled through the air, some splashing into the river, others smashing through tracts of previously burned forest.

Every hour or so, the sound of blaster fire and small explosions rose up from somewhere, only to die down after a few minutes.

As the sun rose halfway to zenith, a dull, steady roar, faint at first, filled the air. Damn, he thought, flying machine. He'd expected at least one of those infernal contraptions, but hoped otherwise.

The roar grew louder, a subtle whine cutting through it. Moments later, the contraption, one of the larger ones, rounded a bend in the river from the west. Goddammit, he hated those things!

Regardless of size, all of the flying-machines had the same configuration. A dull-black hull stretched over a roughly triangular frame. One vertex supported several fins, presumably stabilizers not unlike a bird's tail. A pair of wing-like vanes protruded from the other two vertices, swept back slightly like a kestrel's flight feathers. Between those, an assortment of weapons emplacements, view ports, and miscellaneous bits of as-yet-undetermined function gave the craft's leading edge a crab-like appearance. Roughly halfway between each vertex and the center, a round device area several dozen yards across, like a many-bladed fan, spun rapidly, supplying lift.

The contraption soared through the air, tilted forward at a slight angle, just a little below Flatiron's vantage point, moving faster than anything he'd ever seen, natural or man-made. He stepped back toward the trees a little more as it came toward him. A gout of fire burst on its underside and quickly blew out in the downdraft from the nearest fan.

It arced around past him, taking two more hits, one on the leading edge of a wing and the other right in the face, leaving a trail of shredding smoke. It picked up another impotent hit from the Washington side on its path over the burning fortress. A few sparks danced off a tail fin before it had come fully around.

Another bit of fire bloomed on the dorsal side, blazed up, then went out with no apparent effect. A fountain of flame erupted from the port-side fan with a loud, shrill screech followed by rapid, dull clanking and thudding noises. Even from that distance, Flatiron could see large shards of metal sheer off and hurtle away in glinting blurs. Dark smoke poured from the housing.

The machine tipped almost on its edge, and arced around again, raining burning material in its path. Its port-side wing tip clipped the fortress wall, cartwheeled briefly, tore a stabilizer off, bounced off the ground, and plowed into a pair of islands just downriver. Moments later, the whole thing cracked in half across the middle, the explosion a thunderclap that shook the Gorge. Large chunks of machinery and Martian rained down into the water and the surrounding forest.

Flatiron barely heard his own victory whoop over the noise. For two-score heartbeats, he surveyed the continuing carnage his unit had wrought. Satisfied, he flipped his magnifiers up and made his way back to camp.

He met his medical staff, all women, waiting beside the command tent. The dozen-and-a-half of them loitered about, a few standing, most sitting on logs or folding canvas-and-wood camp stools. All wore a version of the Army camo uniform, trousers a little less baggy and a suggestion of skirts coming down to mid-thigh. Each of them carried a blaster, Bowie knife, and several grenades.

They popped to their feet and stood at a passable attention, the sprigs of greenery tied to their clothing briefly bobbing, goggles tipping their hats back a little.

“Colonel!” said Dr. Inga Svensdotter.

“Lieutentant,” he said. “Ladies,” he added. “Y'all ready?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” they said in unison.

“Let's do it!” added Inga's sister Thora.

Flatiron allowed himself a slight smile. No matter how tough, dirty, cold, wet, hot, dry, or otherwise miserable the trail might be, the corpswomen under his command managed a certain enthusiasm. Most of the time.

He nodded. “Let's go!” He added a gesture toward the northern end of the plateau.

The ladies untied and de-hobbled some two dozen mules and alpacas loaded down with medical supplies, much of it improvised, and a little supplemental food.

A sergeant and two privates had already departed a couple of hours earlier leading a mule and three llamas loaded with food and several tarpaulins. Artillery crews deprived of their weapons were likely on their way to being striking camp.

One by one, they began the trek toward Cascade Locks. The several-mile route followed mostly deer trails, switchbacking down into the Gorge mostly through tree cover and the occasional open tract of rocky knoll or burn area. It would probably put them on the valley floor in time for supper.

* * *

Merofled LaConte swiveled through an open doorway into an expansive room. Its ceiling hung a good dozen feet over her head. Two dozen apparently open cells lined most of the perimeter, all filled with miserable-looking humans. The remainder of the wall was cluttered with familiar Martian devices of still-uncertain purpose, despite three years of study.

In the center of the open space, three Martians stood around a table lit from below on which lay a small human.

The Martians turned quickly around. One of them said something in its foul, guttural tongue before LaConte planted an arrow in its face. It lurched backward toward the nearest cell, bounced off some sort of transparent barrier, and then collapsed onto the floor, smoke curling up from its charred back.

The second made a growling sound and lunged. Pez blasted it in the chest. It staggered a step back, tripped over its comrade, and fell over.

The third held a terrified little girl in its grip. The child looked pleadingly at LeConte with red, puffy, tear-stained eyes.

All six of them pointed weapons at the Martien. It uttered what sounded like a demonic laugh. It grabbed an object off a table and jammed it into the girl's neck.

All six weapons discharged nearly at once. The Martian was dead long before it hit the floor. The girl flopped back onto the table and started to roll off. LeConte lunged forward, took the distance in a few long strides, and eased the girl to the floor.

“She still breathes,” she said. “I do not know for how much longer.”

Emerson threw up.

“Oh, dear God,” said Pez.

Behind the barrier, one LaConte knew to be some kind of energy wall, scores of people huddled in the most abject misery she could imagine. Most sat slumped against the far wall. Others lay on the smooth floor, a few at the edge of slowly expanding pools of human effluent that the occupants had apparently tried to confine to a corner nearest the barrier.

Their clothes had clearly not been washed in some time. All of them were thin, and probably hadn't been fed well. Some of them looked like they'd been there for years, others only weeks. All stared out with vacant expressions. All but one woman in a stained calico dress, who knelt by the barrier and looked on the edge of hysteria.

LeConte turned away and squeezed her eyes shut briefly. This was so much worse than at Lakeview.

“Corporal,” she said, “open that barrier.”

Pez stepped over to a panel and began tapping on it. After several moments, several of the lights lining the cell edges turned off.

The woman in calico immediately rushed out and knelt tearfully beside the little girl, sobbing incoherently.

Pez blasted the panel.

LeConte looked at the poor, frightened people. “Come with me if you want to live,” she said.

At first, no one moved. Then, one by one, they climbed to their feet. Some needed help, and a few looked like they were not going anywhere under their own power. Emerson knelt beside the hysterical woman and her apparent daughter, and spoke to her in hushed tones.

“Right,” said Pez, “let's get going before the bastards find out what we're doing.”

The sound of blaster fire erupted down the corridor. A moment later, Emerson backed into the room, shoving people as he went. “I don't think we're going out that way,” he said. He lit a stick of dynamite and hurled it down the hall. It bounced around the corner and exploded. Martian shrieking erupted in the wake of the noise.

A long, egg-shaped object bounced back in return. It came to rest just outside the door and immediately began to disgorge the Black Smoke. LeConte stuck a toe under it and shoved it back down the hallway. It bounced several times before spinning to a halt, spraying Black Smoke in all directions.

Pez pulled an incendiary grenade, lit it, and hurled it after the canister. It burst open and showered that part of the corridor with nitro, kerosene, and magnesium flakes.

Overhead, another impact shook the fortress. Minutes later, the fire down the hall burned itself out. A Martian appeared. Emerson blasted it in the leg. It toppled into the Black Smoke and soon began to twitch violently before finally laying still. The stuff backed up behind its body, most of it flowing in the other direction.

Another object bounced around the corner, a shiny ball with several twinkling lights. LeConte quickly knelt down, snatched it up, and hurled it back. It bounced off one wall, then around the corner. Almost immediately, something flashed a brilliant glaring blue-white. A wave of heat surged out of the hall, then sucked the air back in the backdraft.

“Much more of this,” said Emerson, “and we won't be able to breathe. Is there another way out?”

“Not from here,” said LeConte.

“Wait,” said Pez, “isn't this thing built over a few lakes? If there's one beneath our feet...”

“How are we going to get to them?” Emerson asked. “And even if we can, how are we going to get out?”

“One thing at a time,” said LeConte. “Look for any break in the floor or the wall.”

“Like that?” A boy pointed to the corner of a holding cell. Where the floor met the wall, a series of small holes were set into a panel. “It pulls out, but is too small,” he added.

LeConte peered at it and rubbed her jaw pensively. Pez knelt down a pulled out the panel.

“Does anyone know what is down there?” LeConte asked.

Silence answered.

“Hand me an object. Any object.” A moment later, someone handed her a shard of glass from the blasted panel. She released it into the gap and pressed her ear to it, counting the seconds. After a short while, she heard a plop.

“There is water,” she said, “perhaps thirty feet down.”

“Not much good if we can't get to it,” said Emerson.

“Can we blow it up?” Pez asked.

“Then what?”

“One thing at a time,” said LeConte.

A blaster round sizzled past and slammed into the wall. Someone returned fire. A moment later, a grenade went off down the hall, adding to the growing pile of Martian corpses. Then another explosion shook the building.

“At least we know the walls are solid,” said Pez. “Everyone, back up against that wall.” He motioned toward the opposite corner. “Private, help me drag that thing over here.” He pointed a the dead Martian laying on the floor in a congealing pool of its own fluids.

A few minutes later, they'd dragged the Martian corpse over and wedged two grenades and three sticks of dynamite into the hole. Pez lit it, then tipped the body over the hole. “Hit the dirt!” he yelled and retreated to the far side of the room.

Moments later, a loud _WHUMPH_ echoed through the room. The Martian corpse rose several inches into the air, then settled.

Pez and LeConte eased the body back while the firefight in the corridor continued. Every so often, a blaster bolt slammed into the wall. Martian tissue and fluids coated the wall and floor, some charred by the blast and some not. The hole had grown by an order of magnitude.

“Right,” said Pez, “I think that'll do it. Who's first?”

“I am not going through that,” said Emerson.

“Fine,” said Pez, “then you can stay here.”

“No way! Besides, how are we going to get down there? We didn't bring any rope.”

A man behind Pez took off his shirt and began tearing it into strips.

“Will that work?” LeConte asked.

“Better than falling,” said the man.

Within minutes, everyone, even the women and girls, had removed what clothing they could, began tearing it into strips, and tying those together with square knots. It didn't take long to put together a fifty-foot improvised rope with a bowline loop at the end. Whether it would hold remained to be seen.

The boy who had shown them the opening volunteered to go first. LeConte slipped it over the boy's head and under his arms. He slipped over the jagged edge of the hole and into utter blackness. After several minutes, the cloth went slack.

“I'm down!” the boy called. A moment later, LeConte felt a triple jerk and hauled it back up.

“What can you tell us?” she called.

“It's shallow. Three feet deep right here. It might get deeper, I don't know. I sure could use a light.”

“We will see what we can do.” LeConte turned. “Someone find a light. Surely the Martiens have something like a torch.”

A few moments later, a woman held out a black cylinder. She pulled on it and it slid open like a mariner's telescope, revealing dozens of brightly-shining beads.

“Magnifique! You go next.”

The woman's face blanched, but she nodded. She was halfway down when a blaster bolt caught a man in the shoulder. He grunted.

“Keep that corridor clear!” LeConte growled over his shoulder.

A stick of dynamite went off down the corridor moments later, followed by another incendiary grenade. Little by little, person by person, everyone went down the hole. LeConte completely lost track of time. The enemy seemed to have no shortage of soldiers to throw at them. Sooner or later, her team was going to run out of explosives to hurl back at their attackers.

At last, only the unconscious girl and her mother remained.

“Your turn, madame,” LeConte said.

“Send my daughter first,” she choked.

LeConte nodded. A minute later, the girl vanished into the cavern. A short while later, the woman went after her.

“Right,” said LeConte, “that is the last of them. Our turn. Private, you first.”

“Wait,” he said, “what'll keep the enemy from dropping explosives or the Black Smoke on top of us down there?”

A sizzle of blaster fire whipped past and they returned it, toppling another Martian.

“Can we blow up the corridor?” Pez asked.

“Perhaps,” said LeConte. She tossed a stick of dynamite down the hall. A moment later, it exploded and a Martian shrieked, setting her teeth on edge. “If we throw all our explosives at once?”

“What if we need some to get out of the cavern?” Pez asked.

“The water had to go somewhere, right?” said Emerson.

Blaster fire erupted from the corridor and Pez cried out. Everyone hit the floor, rolled into the prone position and fired back. Another of the metal balls rolled in and LeConte hurled it right back. A moment later, it exploded, sending bits of half-charred Martian flying back into the room.

“Everyone alright?” LeConte asked.

“No,” said Pez. He rolled over to reveal a rather nasty burn wound. “Give me your explosives. I will hold them off. You go.”

“We all go home, or nobody goes home,” said LeConte.

“Just go.”

LeConte looked at Brown and nodded. She unslung her grenade belt and handed most of them to Emerson. She shoved a grenade and two sticks of dynamite into her belt, slung the clothes-rope about her torso, and slipped through the hole.

Two sticks of dynamite and a grenade later, Emerson cranked his head around. “Why are you still here?” he grunted.

“As I said, we all go home, or nobody goes home.” LeConte collected all the available dynamite and grenades. Six sticks and eight grenades. “We throw these all at once. It will seal the tunnel.”

“And kill us in the process.”

“No, only make our ears bleed.”

“That's not very encouraging.”

“Get ready.”

LeConte dodged incoming blaster fire while she tied off the clothes-rope to the pedestal set into the floor near the examination table. “You go. I will follow soon.”

“You're crazy, you know that?”

LeConte pulled a candle out of her pack, set it on the floor, and lit it. She put three wicks at a time to it, then threw the whole mess, four at a time, down the hallway.

“Allez! Allez! Allez!” She practically shoved Emerson through the hole. A moment later, a violent explosion knocked them off their feet. They both slipped and tumbled into the darkness.

LeConte managed to grab the rope. A few feet of it slipped through her hands, stopping at the next knot. Up above, something ripped once...twice...then she was falling. Moments later, she heard a splash below. Then she hit the water herself.

She emerged flailing and gasping, with the certain knowledge that several parts of her anatomy were going to be very sore come morning. Arms grabbed him.

“I have you,” said Brown.

“What happened?” asked Pez.

“We blew them up,” LeConte coughed. “Emerson?”

“Here,” said Emerson. “I still think...”

“Shut up,” said Pez.

“We should go,” said Brown. “It won't take long for them to find out what happened to us.”

“But which direction?”

LeConte looked around. The light emitted by the shining bead lamp reflected off the faces of perhaps half the people assembled. It glinted off the metal above and the rippling water around them. But the cavern vanished into darkness in every direction.

She pointed into the gloom. “That way.”

A minute later, she sloshed out of the water, still several dozen yards, she guessed, from where the shoreline had been before the Martians had deprived it of most of its water source. The lake had been a shallow one, the bottom mostly gravel beneath a thin layer of muck. She made her way directly up the gentle slope until the floor of the fortress hung barely a handspan above her head.

For a short time, she stood there, waiting for the people to catch up while he decided what to do. She only had three choices. They could go back the way they came, which was out of the question. They could go right, which would surely lead them toward the center of the fortress. They could go left, which might bring them to its edge.

LeConte went left, the way barely visible in the blue-ish glow of the strange Martian lamp, picking her way around random boulders. The occasional broad rock hidden by muck sent a step sliding. Every so often, a fir trunk lay where it had fallen, bark still clinging to the wood like the dampness in the stale and musty air. Over these, they had to step.

LeConte wondered what might have died after the Martiens had sealed it over, or what might have somehow found its way in to use the space as a den. Surely anything and everything that could flee had done so, leaving only the trout to fend for themselves. Their remains would surely have been found on the bottom, had anyone possessed the thought to go searching for them.

Ever so slowly, too slowly in LeConte's opinion, they made their way along the shore. The gleaming metallic roof stretched off into the gloom. And all the while, the threat of the Black Smoke hung in her mind.

Without the sun, she had no way of knowing how long it had been since they'd first entered the fortress, much less since they'd begun their trudge along a shore that might very well lead them in circles. And without landmarks, she had no way of knowing how far they had gone. The trek stretched into a continuous echoing morass of labored breathing, intermittent coughing, and the occasional grunt and groan.

After a long while, a broad, low spot in the shore became a tongue of void between the roof and a tangle of fir trunks. A very slight movement of air brushed across her face and a faint tang of smoke wafted into her nose.

She turned over his shoulder. “Do you smell that?”

Brown squished in beside him and took a deep breath through his nose. “Smoke!”

“Is there a gap here, then?” Pez asked.

“How big, I don't know.” She turned around. “I need a volunteer to crawl through there.” She pointed toward the void. “Then tell us what you find.”

“I'll go,” said the boy who had been first through the hole blasted into the floor.

A minute later, he vanished into the darkness. For a long time, LeConte heard nothing but grunting, what sounded like an occasional curse, and a few breaking branches. At very great length, and after more of the same sounds, the boy reappeared, completely covered in mud.

“I got good news and bad news,” said the boy.

“The good news is that there is a gap, oui?” said LeConte.

The boy nodded.

“And the bad news is that it is too small.”

The boy held up his hands, fingers defining a space fit for a rabbit. A few whimpers and moans of despair flittered and died.

“What else?” LeConte probed.

The boy just looked at her.

“Can we dig out?”

The boy shook his head. “Too much rock.”

“Could you see daylight?”

“A little, sure.”

“Maybe,” said Emerson, “we can blast our way out. How much dynamite we got?”

“Two sticks,” said Brown, “and one grenade.”

“One stick,” said LeConte.

“Four,” said Pez.

“Is that enough?”

“But how are we gonna light it? You heard how long it took the boy to get in there.”

“I can do it!” the boy gushed. “Really, I can!”

“Are you sure?” LeConte asked.

The boy nodded emphatically.

“I should go,” said Emerson.

“Sacre Dieu, Emerson,” said Renard, “you can barely walk.”

“This gut wound is killin' me, ma'am. You know it. I know it. We all know it. Just as we all know that whoever takes the dynamite in there ain't got time to crawl back.”

“I could duck behind one of them trees,” the boy suggested.

“A tree?” said Pez. “Boy, that ain't gonna help. It's dynamite! The whole purpose of the stuff is...”

“To blow things up, I know. Pa used it on stumps in the field. An' gophers. But we gotta get out of here an' we ain't got any other choices, do we sir?”

LeConte met the boy's gaze for several seconds. At length, she shook her head. “Only two. Go back the way we came, and keep going and hope we find a bigger gap.”

“Son,” said Emerson, “you have a life ahead of you.”

“They got my sister!” the boy growled.

“Then your best revenge is to stay alive. Which ain't gonna happen if you blow yourself up.”

“It ain't gonna happen if we stay here either.”

A cacophony of voices rose up from the people. It took LeConte what felt like several minutes to sort it out and shut them up.

“Hey,” said Pez, “where'd he go?”

LeConte and several others looked around. “Oh, non, he did not.” She instinctively groped at the pockets where he'd had two sticks of dynamite stowed. “Sacre Dieu!”

She took two steps forward before Pez grabbed her. “Don't, ma'am,” he said. “You'll never fit.”

LeConte stood there for what felt like forever, just staring in the direction the boy had gone.

“Should we...” Pez never finished his question.

A deafening explosion rocked the cavern. Bits of dirt, rock, and wood hurtled at them at gale force. Something large, soft, and wet slammed into LeConte and knocked her onto her back. Her elbow struck a rock.

For several moments, she just lay there, stunned. Her ears rang and the tang of burned-up TNT filled her nostrils. She could already tell she was going to have one hell of a bruise on her arm. And whatever lay on her was heavy.

The object coughed in her ear. “Ow,” it groaned.

“Goddammit!” said Pez. “Boy, you're crazy!”

“I had to,” he croaked. “You were arguing too much. Besides,” he added, “someone had to do it.”

“I see daylight!” a woman yelped.

A chorus of excited voices floated about as people picked themselves out of the muck.

“See, Private,” said Pez, “you're gonna live.”

“Still hurts like hell,” said Emerson.

“Tell that to the doctors.” Pez shook his head. “And don't even start with them.”

“Aw, come on. I'm injured. Don't that get me some leeway?”

“It might get you a suppository.”

“Do not encourage him,” said LeConte, “he might like that.”

“Alright,” said Pez, “let's get the hell out of here. Looks like I'm on point.”

* * *

Several hours later, Flatiron stood on the main street of what had once been the town of Cascade Locks, completely incinerated by the Martians and then mostly washed out later. Only a few stone foundations, some of the broken lock hardware, and some larger charred timbers remained.

In front of him, the last two rafts full of refugees fetched up against the shore where several of his men waited to assist. Behind, camp continued going up, under tree cover as always.

One of the trebuchets remained, now re-assembled just off the road, and three of the ballistae, now re-deployed at the edges of camp and beneath trees near the river. Over a dozen of the men had been treated for burns. Seven had been killed in the action.

Most of the refugees had survived, all being treated for chemical burns and abrasions, minor smoke inhalation, narrow brushes with the Black Smoke, and the effects of long-term malnutrition. About a dozen of them lay shrouded in a row at the edge of camp, awaiting proper burial.

Flatiron looked over to LeConte. “Good work,” he said.

The woman nodded. “It could have been much worse.”

Flatiron nodded. “Indeed.”

He gazed into her eyes for several long moments, trying to read the thoughts behind them, then looked away.

Across the river, the Martian fortress still burned, and probably would for a while. The smoke drifted toward the west. Most of the red weed around it had burned up, with only a few edges left. Every couple of minutes, one of the fruits popped with a sudden flare of fire.

Upriver, a tripod stuck out of the water where it had fallen. The glint of metal marked where two others had gone down. Fallen trunks lay pinned beneath a leg here. Large shards of tripod metal stood lodged deep in the trunks of still-living trees.

Downriver, several more tripods lay crumpled where they'd fallen, a couple with bits of trees poking through them, others half-submerged with water roiling around them. The flying-machine still sat lodged in earth and rock, its aft end raised high in the air. The river backed up behind it, spilling around its edges.

On both sides, red weed burned, the flames creeping in all directions. Whisps of smoke rose from a few tenacious fires that had torched small stands of fir and cedar.

All across the ruins of Cascade Locks, a subdued party had broken out. That anyone celebrated at all was a good sign. All the people they had freed were still weak and malnourished. Some of them suffered from smoke inhalation, some of it from burning red weed and who knew what else. A few of them might, according to the doctors, have lingering respiratory issues for the rest of their lives.

One little girl who had been injected with an unknown substance by a Martian still lived, though her prognosis was far from certain. According to her mother, the girl did not seem to be any worse that she had been earlier that day.

In any event, it was a foregone conclusion that they would all be staying for the better part of a week.

A dozen and a half of the Martians had been captured. They had all been pulled out of disabled suits and once removed, they struggled to even stand, though they still made a valiant, tireless effort of it. Two of them had been injured and later died of their wounds. Three others had been beaten to death by angry civilians, and understandably so. Still, Flatiron had put a security detail on the creatures. He had also had them manacled, even though it hardly seemed necessary. But he knew their harmless appearance to be deceptive. He had seen them in action with the help of their suits and knew their ruthlessness if given the opportunity and the tools.

For hours, the weed burned, its fruits exploding in weak _WHUMPH_ sounds. All night long, as the weed fires spread up each creek on both sides of the river, came the near-continual _WHUMP...WHUMPH...WHUMPH_ , the sounds gradually fading with the distance. Only the dampness of spring kept the whole forest from going up.

Inga walked up to him.

“How long do you think that will keep up?” she asked.

“You mean tonight, or until that stuff is finally eradicated?” Flatiron replied.

“Both.”

He grunted. “Half these creeks run all the way to the crest. Some of them, like Eagle Creek just down that way...” He gestured westward. “...fall a good fourteen, maybe fifteen miles. And that one flows out of Wahtum Lake.”

She snorted. “Yeah, that thing's going to be a damned cauldron, isn't it?”

“Yep. At a mile an hour, I figure a lot of this will be going all night and well into tomorrow. At least within earshot. With any luck, the fire will keep going up and down river, and burn out every red weed patch in the entire Columbia watershed.”

“One can hope. Until the tripods in the Willamette snuff it out.”

“One thing at a time, Lieutenant.”

He looked past her toward the expanses of mottled green canvas set up as a field hospital. At least half the rescuees still sat huddled on the ground, some on blankets, some not, others on logs. In the first hour, they'd completely exhausted the unit's supply of gauze. After that, the medical staff had resorted to moss and tree lichen, both surprisingly difficult to find given both the fires and the years of intermittent red weed infestation. A few cases were so bad, Anna had tied salmon skins around the wounds, a treatment she'd read about for severe burns before the Invasion.

Over half the people had hands so badly blistered from the caustic rinds of the red weed fruit that they barely had any skin left. In many cases, they were raw and bleeding, with open sores showing badly damaged muscle.

“What's your prognosis?” he asked.

Inga shook her head. “Hard to say. Physically? Most of them should recover. I think they'll all have scars on their hands. Many of them have permanent nerve damage. They'll never be able to feel anything with their hands the rest of their lives. Most of them also have a few sores on other parts of their bodies. Some of those are from the weed, and some from...” She paused to swallow. “...having to lay in their own urine.”

She visibly forced back a tear before continuing.

“Dammit, Colonel, how can they be so cruel?”

Flatiron put a hand on each of her shoulders. “We say the same thing about people who keep pit dogs.”

“But we don't eat dogs.”

“In China, they do. And veal calves? We eat those.”

She looked him in the eye. “I should be glad I was here, shouldn't I?”

He nodded. “The reports...I would not have wanted to see that, either.”

She exhaled heavily. “So, aside from the chemical wounds, they're all suffering from dehydration and malnutrition. It was all most of them could do just to...you saw them stumble off the rafts.”

He nodded. Many of them had tripped. Several had to be carried.

“And the pregnant mothers? I'll be surprised if half of them don't miscarry. I don't know how we're going to move them before the retaliation.”

“We have to figure that out. We'll have to move just after dawn.”

“Dawn?! Sir, half those people can barely walk. I honestly don't know how they kept going. Sheer desperation, I guess. That's about the only thing holding most of them together. And mentally? They're all going to have nightmares. Or psychoses. Or trauma. Or...you know.”

Flatiron flinched slightly. Everyone he knew who had any encounters with the Martians had been changed by it, dramatically in many cases.

“How's the girl?” he asked.

Inga craned her neck around and sighed deeply through her nose. “I don't know. She's stable, that's all I can say. We have no idea what they pumped into her. I managed to swab a sample out of the puncture wound, but I won't have any way to analyze it until I can get to Fort Custer. And that's assuming whatever it is doesn't break down into something else.

“And even if we can and do discover the composition, there's still the matter of the nature of the beast. Best case scenario, we won't know what that stuff is doing to her for at least a month. By then, whatever it is will already have done whatever it is it's going to do.”

Flatiron looked toward the tent where the girl's mother sat on a folding stool beside her daughter. “Will we have the guts to do what must be done?”

Inga looked sharply at him. “We don't know that yet,” she said curtly.

“But someone might have to.”

She nodded reluctantly. “Yeah. Something like that.”

“The hardest part will be convincing the mother.”

She let out a short laugh. “That's an understatement.”

“What's your recommendation, then, Doctor?”

“Normally, I'd say keep her under sedation. Barring that, I'd feel better about using restraints. And no, before you ask, I do _not_ like it. But we have no idea what could happen when she wakes up, assuming she does. We should at least post a twenty-four-seven guard on her.”

He nodded. “I'll arrange it.”

She sighed again. “Their morale is already improving, though. We've got the first real cook fires we've made since leaving Fort Bend, for one thing. And the way the people are huddling around them, it's like they haven't been truly warm for...well, since they were abducted.”

“It's a bit chilly out,” he admitted.

“I think it's more than that. More than just the warmth itself. I think it's what fire represents to them. To all of us. There's something primal about it, something that touches whatever it is inside us that makes us human, that separates us from the great apes.”

She shook her head.

“And,” she added, “it's the first decent meal any of them have had in a while. Granted, half of them had to be convinced to eat it. Something about the fish?”

“The reports said there were salmon carcasses in the cells.”

“Oh, good Lord. Those bastards just tossed them raw whole fish and expected them to eat it?”

“Apparently they did.”

She groaned. “Good thing we brought a few things along.”

“Good thing LeConte knows the wild edibles,” he added.

“That, too.”

“And the boy?”

“Concussion, one ruptured ear drum, four sprung ribs, badly bruised kneecap. He's damned lucky to be alive. And his mother...yep, some woman sitting beside the unconscious girl...” Inga just shook her head.

He looked back at the camp. The last rays of sunlight shone on the yellow clusters of bigleaf maple flowers, turning them into lamps that mirrored the blazing yellow skunk cabbages that still managed to poke through the red weed. In the distance, red weed fires burned their way up the gorge toward Hood River. By this time tomorrow, those fires should be halfway to the flanks of Mt. Hood on the Oregon side and up Wind River on the Washington side.

“Get something to eat, you,” he said. “Something that's not pemmican. I'll set the watch, and see about bedding everyone down for the night. One way or another, we're going to have to move out in the morning.”

Inga groaned. “Yes, Colonel,” she said grudgingly and walked away.

“Andi?” said Merofled.

“Mmm?”

“We should talk.”

He nodded. “About what?”

“About us.”

He cocked an eyebrow, then took one of her hands in his own. “Darling, you know...”

She touched a finger to his lips. “There is more us,” she said. When he frowned, she lightly pressed one of his hands against her belly and raised both eyebrows expectantly.

He felt his own raise in return. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “It has been a few weeks.”

“Ah. So the...” He let the rest go unspoken, confirmed with a nod.

“And you went barging off to lay siege to that...”

“Bien sur!” she snapped. “Forget that. I had to go. You know it. I know it. And you know very well why I fight, do not forget. Why would I not also defend our child? Fight for a chance for her...or him...to be born into a world free of les Martiens?”

He exhaled through his nose. He knew she was right, of course. She usually was. It was why they made such a good team and one of many reasons he'd fallen in love with her in the first place.

For a few dozen heartbeats, he gazed into her beautiful brown eyes, side-lit by the setting sun. Then he sank to one knee. “Not sure I have more to offer than what I already have. But...Merofled LeConte...veut-tu te marrier avec moi?”

She tipped her head back and laughed brightly. “You dear, silly, wonderful homme. If you knew how long I have waited for you to ask me that. Bien sur!”

He almost launched himself back to his feet and kissed her deeply.

In the west, the sun sank toward the Cascade ridges, its light glinting off the jagged remains of broken and fallen tripods and the walls of the Alien fortress. It had been a good day.


	5. The Bull Moose Campaign

Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt grinned in the near-darkness broken only by a crescent moon in the waning evening twilight. He never would have imagined his Rough Riders might be trading their four-legged flesh-and-blood horses for three-legged iron ones. Or whatever the hell those Martian contraptions were made of.

Not that they had many horses left after last week's unfortunate run-in with that infernal Heat-Ray. But his men had eaten well, so there'd been that.

His original objective had involved Cuba. But with the coming of the third wave of Martian attacks, President McKinley himself had issued Roosevelt his new orders. Orders that had already proven as all-consuming as Lewis and Clark's voyage nearly a century before.

More than half a decade of Martian occupation had taught the Army a thing or two about troop movement. Specifically, how to do it without being discovered by the ever-watchful Martian eye and subsequently incinerated. Which had come to involve a frustrating amount of subterfuge, circuitous routes, and general sneaking about.

And so the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry had not ridden from a muster point as a unit. Rather, the order had been to assemble in late May at a staging area specifically designated for the current operation. Ft. Bridger in southwestern Wyoming had been chosen.

Still, the logistics had been outright hellish. The only still-intact rail line anywhere near the target passed through southern Wyoming. Even so, several sections of line had needed repair between there and southern Nevada.

So much of the railroad ran through country so wide and exposed, that no Martian could possibly fail to notice. Not from their tripods, and certainly not from their fantastic flying machines.

Hence the ingenious device built by Drs. Janos Bartok, Albert Wickwire, and Nikola Tesla. Roosevelt thought it needed a lot more development, and even its creators couldn't deny it. Unbelievably bulky, an entire rail car was needed to mount it. But it turned any train into a mobile weapons platform based on the Heat-Ray.

They called it the Micro-Wave. Roosevelt had been briefed on the science behind it, of course, but many of the minutia had gone over his head. Developed at Ft. Custer, a top-secret research facility established in Nevada shortly after the failure of the First Wave and before the details of the Martians and their technology had become general knowledge, the Micro-Wave both boiled water and elicited sparks from metal. Its first demonstration had greatly impressed him.

Roosevelt scanned the horizon. Aside from the incessant shimmering heat distortions, only a two-dozen-man repair team moved. Promontory Point. It figured that the final section of the Trans-continental Railroad would have been one of the first wrecked by the Martians.

Of the town itself, little remained but drifts of ash and twisted, warped iron and sooty copper and brass half-piled against charred stone foundations. A section of rail had been violently torn up, the ties torched, the iron bent, much of it beyond repair.

Of its inhabitants, only a scattering of gnawed and sun-bleached bones had been found, a skull with a still-attached shock of hair here, a partial rib cage there. Roosevelt had ordered a detachment to round up what bones had not been dragged away by coyotes or pulverized beneath collapsing conflagrations and give them what passed for a good Christian burial in an unavoidable mass grave built mostly out of plentiful rock. For those poor victims snatched up bodily and hauled off by the Martians, Roosevelt could offer only prayers for quick and painless deaths and divine mercy on their souls thereafter.

A man trotted up, shirt unbuttoned all the way down. Roosevelt frowned at him, but said nothing. He couldn't blame anyone for such a breach of the uniform. Not in this heat and certainly not doing such backbreaking work in it.

He saluted. “Almost done, General,” he said crisply.

“Good work, Captain,” said Roosevelt.

“But, sir, uh...” The Captain looked over his shoulder, then back. “...we had to use three rails.”

Roosevelt nodded. “So noted. Wrap it up.”

“Sir!”

Roosevelt exhaled slowly. He'd read the reports of rail destruction during the Civil War. But these Martians had turned the practice into an art form. The train under his command had departed Ft. Custer carrying an entire car load of rails and another of ties to be used in places devoid of available timber. They'd used up half of it before reaching Reno. Or, rather, what was left of Reno.

They'd salvaged what they could from the Reno Classification Yard before continuing eastward. Progress had been glacial. What should have taken a single day had stretched into an entire week. Every tunnel mouth had either collapsed or been blocked by rockfall. Every trestle had been incinerated along with adjacent tracts of vegetation.

The only good news had been the complete absence of any Martians. Their tracks had been all over the place, of course, their three-toed tripod feet rammed into the earth. And every town had been deserted. Though whether their residents had fled or been abducted could not be determined. Several towns had burned to the ground, in whole or in part, along with expansive swaths of grass and sagebrush. Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Elko, and Wells had all burned. So had parts of Tonopah, Reno, and Carson City. Of places in between marked only by ash and scorched earth, Roosevelt could only guess at what had been there. One of his Lieutenants had taken detailed notes, complete with copious quite well-done graphite sketches.

Roosevelt looked in the general direction of Ogden and the hope of resupply. Something moved out there, something not natural. He flipped down the magnifier on his goggles. The all-too-familiar forms of three Martian tripods, two standard and one cargo-mover traveling in the standard twenty-yard configuration, leaped into stark detail.

“Lieutenant!” he bellowed. “We're about to have company!”

“Yes, sir!” Lieutenant Jeffries and his crew erupted into action. In a few moments, they'd untied and thrown off the tawny canvas tarpaulin covering the load. In less than a minute more, they'd unlimbered the Micro-Wave barrel, a cast brass tube four yards long with various rings and protuberances fixed to it at intervals. The emitter to which the barrel was mounted was likewise an affair of gleaming brass, glass tubes, hoses, valves, and several other attendant devices Roosevelt couldn't have named if his life depended on it.

“Range, sir?” called Jeffries.

Roosevelt looked again toward the enemy. “Ten miles, a shade less, I'd say.”

Several men hauled a trio of hoses across to the steam engine and screwed couplers onto stout mating fittings riveted to the water tank and cranked open the attending valves while the engineer tossed another shovel full of coal into the firebox and cranked various levers.

Steam hissed, gauge needles swung and the emitter began to hum and arc. Soldiers spun various wheels as the platform holding the Micro-Wave device raised and swiveled. Jeffries jumped into a small chair mounted to the emitter casing and peered through a targeting scope. Roosevelt climbed down from the engine while his Lieutenant barked various orientation commands.

This was one of the few situations in which they had an advantage. The Heat-Ray had an effective range of only one mile, beyond which its effects merely became severely unpleasant. The worst injury being a second-degree burn, although steam explosions had been reported as damp objects had been subjected to the Heat-Ray beyond the one-mile range. The associated injuries from flying debris and scalding steam had been downright stomach-churning. Upwards of two miles, the effect dramatically diminished. Furthermore, it had a tight beam, no more than a foot across, three if one considered what the scientists called bleed-off.

The Micro-Wave, on the other hand, had a theoretically unlimited range. What was more, the beam could be adjusted to increase the target area, although at the expense of power delivered per square foot of the target. But, while it had yet to be tested under anything other than dry desert air, it was said that fog would, as with the Martian Heat-Ray, diffuse the Micro-Wave and greatly reduce its effectiveness.

“Lieutanant,” said Roosevelt, “target the center tripod. Fire when ready.”

“Affirmative, sir. Center tripod!” Jeffries barked more commands and the platform realigned slightly.

The humming and arcing intensified. At length, Jeffries yelled, “ _CLEAR! FIRE IN THE HOLE!_ ”

Roosevelt had seen for himself a test-firing of the weapon. Now, as then, he found it to be somewhat anti-climactic. Only a collection of unique buzzing and whooshing sounds accompanied the discharge, and, like the Martian Heat-Ray, certainly next to nothing visible to mark the path of the ray. Other than that, he did not know what to expect.

Several moments later, the center tripod exploded in a glaring flash of blue-green. Roosevelt was instantly glad he had slid the tinted lenses into place over his goggles. Through a haze of dust, he could see the wreckage of all three tripods and a trio of smoke plumes. Of the center one, little could be seen. The other two lay on the salt flat in crumpled metal.

His men let out whoops of triumph.

“Well-done, men!” Roosevelt announced. That was, he knew, only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Three tripods out of how many hundreds? Thousands, even? And what of the flying machines? But the weapon worked, and was clearly effective in its first-ever field deployment. Most importantly, it represented the first genuinely good news in the war to end all wars, and the effect on morale was never to be underestimated.

Roosevelt began making mental notes, even as his men worked to stow and secure the Micro-Wave for continued transport. He hoped the smaller portable models carried in one of the box cars would be even half as effective.

* * *

Roosevelt saw the smoke rising up from Ft. Bridger long before he smelled it, and smelled it long before he saw it. The tang of charred sagebrush and wood met his nostrils. But not, he noted, the odor of burnt flesh. So it was with satisfaction that he found the fort still standing.

Just a hundred yards north of the fort lay the wreckage of four standard tripods, three riddled with holes and one obviously heat-warped and with the distinctive blue-ing typical of unevenly heated and cooled ferrous alloy. A meeting with Colonel O'Neil filled in the details. The fort had installed two large-caliber Gatling guns protected by mirrors, which had reflected the Heat-Ray back at one of the tripods.

The two Gatlings had first disabled the Heat-Ray units of the other three before pumping rounds into the tripods themselves. But the Martians had managed to set several fires before their untimely demise. That had been the third attack that week and it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that the fort's respite would not last long. Fortunately, the surrounding country provided nowhere to hide for anything larger than a jackrabbit. Still, it was only a matter of time before the Martians sent one of their flying machines, as had happened to every fort that had managed to fend off a half-dozen ground assaults.

Roosevelt left standing orders with the Ft. Bridger's commander. Any Rough Riders arriving after his own departure were to group in companies of one dozen and ride north at least as far as Jackson Hole where they were to receive more specific orders.

* * *

Roosevelt departed Ft. Bridger leading the first company. The rest of the unit was to follow in roughly two dozen teams, each departing an hour apart. They were to follow one of three routes: along the Green River; along the base of the Wind River Range to the northeast; or the base of the Range to the west. Standing orders were to duck and cover in case of Martians. No man was to fire unless fired upon.

He didn't have complete confidence that those orders would be followed. Too many of the Rough Riders had lost friends and family to the Martian attacks. And too many of them had broad independent streaks not unlike himself, come to think of it. No, he expected at least one team to attempt to take on a tripod. And truth be told, he expected victory. What concerned him were the potential losses, and even more, that word of his troop movement might be relayed back to the Martian base of operations.

He found Jackson Hole burned to the ground. Most of the survivors had fled by boat down the Snake River. Only a few dozen hardy souls and small contingent of the regular Army remained to greet him, having taken cover in the surrounding forest where they'd been for at least a week. They'd been living off of whatever had been left behind, which hadn't been much, along with fish and elk.

He waited for two days, during which he conferred with Captain Morgan for the latest observations. On the second day, one of the Martian flying machines sailed down the valley, headed south on some indeterminate errand. As the Rough Riders arrived, they spread out along the base of Snow King Mountain. He still marveled at the stark contrast between the Rough Rider encampment and those he'd seen before the coming of the Martians. No neat rows of white canvas tents. No masses of horses. No plumes of cook-fire smoke.

Instead, all canvas had been dyed in random mottled green and brown patterns that blended in with woodlands. Small A-framed tents housed a single man and could be pitched or struck in minutes. Each man carried a compact kerosene-fueled stove developed by a Professor in Oregon, efficient and nearly smokeless. All animals, whether horse or mule, were hobbled inside the tree-line.

Roosevelt ordered camp to be struck an hour before dawn on the third day. Frost lay heavy on the ground and the breath of men and beasts billowed into the chilly air. From that moment, no one was the engage the Martians until the assault began on their fortress in Yellowstone. He hoped he didn't have to remind anyone of what misfortune had befallen the unit that had tried to take down the Martian fortress near the Alamo.

The reports he'd received from the commanders of his unit division were not encouraging. A dozen tripods had stalked southward, always in groups of three. None had returned. Five had been destroyed by his men somewhere between Ft. Bridger and Bondurant. He had to assume the Martians knew to expect something.

Progress through the upper Snake River Valley was slow. The unit strung out along the valley's eastern edge, never more than a few dozen paces from tree cover. Which kept the Rough Riders much further east of the road than Roosevelt would have preferred. In fact, he and the lead two dozen men had already crossed the Gros Ventre River before the final group had even left Jackson. This continued until the valley squeezed out the grassland just north of Moran.

At that point, the unit bunched up and camped on the forested flats just outside the park. An expanse of lodgepole pine forest, unbroken save where fire had torched acres of timber, stretched from there through Yellowstone and beyond. Which meant plenty of cover. Whether an army of several hundred could move all the way to Yellowstone Lake remained to be seen.

* * *

Roosevelt skulked toward the Martian fortress, loaded down with all the weaponry he could carry. All exposed skin, like that of every other soldier in the unit, had been blackened with soot from the copious charred timber stretching from the lake's western edge at least as far as the crest of the Central Plateau, probably beyond.

There had been no opportunity for anything resembling a motivational speech. No St Crispin's Day, nothing. He'd given it at the Flagg Ranch camp the day before, something along the lines of, “...now for wrath, now for ruin, and the red dawn!” Just creeping from tent to tent in the darkness, rousing each man, and the lot of them grabbing their gear and setting their collective jaws in grim determination. No, there was just a firm hand-clasp and the meeting of eyes half-seen in the light of a waxing crescent moon reflecting off lingering patchy snow.

The Martian fortress straddled the intersection of the road toward the Upper Geyser Basin, encompassing the entire West Thumb Geyser Basin and then some. Even from where the road crested out over the Continental Divide, the thing had been frighteningly massive. Up close, it was even worse.

A massive wall, part metal, part rock, rose straight up from the ground, without any apparent footing. From its semi-smooth, bronzy surface protruded a veritable forest of wicked-looking spikes, all tilted downward. Survey from the south yielded estimates on wall thickness in the range of at least three yards and a height of at least three stories. Along its top ran a flat walkway patrolled by what appeared to be small tripods. Where the road vanished beneath the wall, a single gate made of overlapping metal plates broke the otherwise continuous surface.

The lake itself was infested by the red weed, spread out a seemingly impossible distance, floating on the water like lily pads and choking the shoreline. It covered most of the West Thumb and had crept up Big Thumb Creek at least a mile, possibly more. Its blue-green glow combined with the weak silvery moonlight in a way that made Roosevelt's vision swim slightly and made several other men nauseous to the point that he'd had to reassign them to the observation detail back on the crest or to one of the Micro-Wave or artillery batteries also back up the road a clip.

Which had, of course, played merry havoc with several of the assault teams. That was on top of only having a little over half of the original twelve hundred he'd been expecting. Well, no battle plan ever survived first contact with the enemy anyway. It was a miracle they'd made it that far in the first place.

After some time, his Captain asked in a barely-audible near-whisper, “What are you thinking, sir?”

At length, Roosevelt answered softly, “That if we pull this off, we go down in history.”

“And if we don't?”

“Then we'll go down in history all the same. Just won't be too many folks left alive to remember it, is all.”

“I just hope we learned enough about them from the first time, sir.”

“So do I, Captain. So do I.”

Roosevelt raised his field glasses and peered across toward the fortress. As before, the usual greenish glow diffused through the geyser steam rising into the night. And of course, the eerie bioluminesence emitted by the red weed that choked the shoreline. Nothing else moved, though it was a foregone conclusion that the Martians themselves weren't asleep.

The things apparently didn't sleep. Ever.

Which meant that approaching the wall unobserved was going to be a first-rate pain in the rear, even with generous quantities of lodgepole pine twigs augmenting his team's camouflage.

He exhaled, his breath coming out in a barely-seen cloud. It was time.

His feet crunched the brittle remains of the red weed that had advanced across the forest floor with the spring thaw, only to wither with the onset of summer's heat and drought. Minutes later, he met up with the rest of his team. Damn good thing he knew exactly where he'd left them. With the local cammo, and every inch of skin covered except a slit between hat brim and mottled face scarf, even a bear might have missed them, and that in broad daylight!

He made a series of staccato hissing noises in Morse code. Then he turned and slowly led the way toward the fortress, his twenty-man team following with their gear.

Across the Divide in the Upper Geyser Basin, a counterpart team under the command of Major Payne and another in the north at the Monument Geyser Basin under Captain Kidd should be investing the fortresses there in a like manner.

High on the adjacent hillsides, the artillery crews would be rousing about now, readying themselves to provide cover fire and diversions. Of course, no battle plan ever survived first contact with the enemy, but his men had their standing orders and Roosevelt had hand-picked the unit commanders for their ability to improvise and adapt quickly. And if he hadn't done his job, then he wouldn't make it out alive anyway.

The men spread out, each putting a full two-dozen paces between himself and the nearest man, and picked their way through the red weed field at a pace that would have put a snail to shame. Move a limb...pause for six breaths...move another...pause for six more breaths. And all at a crawl.

They sky to the east had begun to lighten by the time Roosevelt flattened himself against the wall beneath one of the spikes. Its surface was far rougher than it had appeared from a distance, even under magnification. Hell, he'd climbed smoother granite.

He stole a glance at the figure beside him, the only woman in the regiment. And the only one none of the men would dare harass. A few had tried, and she'd promptly put every one of them in hospice.

At barely sixteen, and after months of constantly pestering anyone and everyone who even appeared to be listening, Samantha Jones had been allowed to join up, for no other reason, Theodore suspected, than to get her out of the collective hair of everyone at Ft. Custer. Even then, it had taken a presidential order from McKinley himself on the grounds that the girl's talents should not be kept locked away in a research facility, and that, in his words, “she is a human being who deserves to breathe fresh air, stretch her limbs, and take revenge on the Martians who so afflicted her.”

Most commanders Roosevelt knew probably would have relegated the girl to some reserve duty. After only one hour after first acquaintance, he'd known she would never have stood for that. And never mind that she could have personally swabbed the decks with every Martian in Yellowstone almost without breaking a sweat. No, if anyone in the world deserved to be assaulting a Martian fortress, it was Samantha. Now, if she could keep her youthful impulsiveness from getting her killed, that would be a victory by itself.

“Are you ready for this?” he coded to her.

She just snorted in reply and launched herself to the first spike, her her soft-soled doeskin moccasins gripping the pebbled metal with more ease than Roosevelt thought should be proper. But there were certain matters he'd stopped trying to push. He'd gladly leave to her mother the task of putting her back into skirts after the war.

He took a minute to catch his breath and steady his nerves before heaving himself up and over the first spike, staying as close to its base as he could. He didn't care to think about the consequences of a fall, and even less about the juice of crushed red weed fruits soaking into his clothing after impact.

He looked to the left and right, his fellow climbers visible as dark blobs in the incipient dawn twilight. All of them had been tree-climbers, iron-workers, or tall-ship riggers before volunteering, all with the agility of squirrels and a complete indifference to precarious heights.

The climb seemed to take even longer than the creep across the open field, and his arms and legs burned by the time he rolled over the battlement into a combat-ready crouch. He held that position for a full dozen breaths, watching and listening. Samantha knelt three paces away, visible only as a dark shape against barely-glinting metal. Off to the right, a Martian stalked around a vertex where two long walls came together.

In the gloom, he saw Samantha unsheath her Bowie knife, the glint of blade and wall melding together. The target closed the distance in only eight steps. She rose up behind it, and drove her blade into the back of the Martian's head. The distinctive sound of a sharp edge slicing through meat sounded loud in his ears.

The Martian stiffened, twitched, and started to tip forward. Its weapon fell from its hand and clattered on the floor. Its own weight pulled it away from Samantha's blade. She nudged it like a falling tree over the wall's edge. Moments later, it landed unseen with an audible wet _THUMP_. Samantha grunted in satisfaction. She kept her knife, now coated with dark Martian fluid, ready in a back-handed grip.

Roosevelt grinned behind his mask and turned his gaze across the expansive fortress. Its interior, though only a couple of yards below the wall, lay in complete darkness. In his mind's eye, he conjured up the various walkways and hatches shown on the meticulous drawings made from blurry photographs taken the previous August by hang-gliders launched at extreme risk from the Absarokas on the eastern edge of the park.

At each of the fort's six vertices, an access opening blazed with a pallid light. The roof spanning the entire spaced enclosed by the wall bulged upward in the center, where scores of overlapping plates formed a horizontal door through which passed the flying-machines. Between that and each vertex was set a smaller door for tripod access. Catwalks cross-crossed the entire space.

Across the lake, the Absarokas stood silhouetted against the lightening pale blue sky, the reflection merging eerily with the glowing red weed.

The light gleamed dully off the carapace of a Martian patrol machine skittering slowly toward them like a six-legged spider, the points of its feet tunking on the metal floor. As it rounded the vertex ahead, Roosevelt saw Samantha's hand twitch slightly in the gloom.

The machine lurched sideways, then slid across the floor, metal sparking on metal, tore a Heat-Ray emitter off its base, and toppled over the edge. Roosevelt braced for the crash that came a moment later.

Samantha turned toward him, her eyes dancing even in the pre-dawn gloom. Dammit, but that girl was having too much fun already.

“Focus,” he chirped to her.

She responded with a short chuckle.

Roosevelt scanned the perimeter. Sooner or later, someone was going to have to do something else noisy. Blasterfire erupted on the opposite side of the fort. “Sometimes,” he muttered, “I hate it when I'm right.”

Roosevelt broke into a run and overtook Samantha in three strides. “With me,” he barked on his way past.

She fell in beside him. “Where else?” she asked.

They half-slid to a halt beside the snapped Heat-Ray mounting.

He drew his twin blasters Des and Troy. “Get ready,” he ordered.

Samantha slid a polished brass tube from beneath her shirt. “I was born ready.”

He shot her a look, but said nothing. Her statement wasn't far from the truth. In addition to a blaster and Bowie knife, she alone carried a third weapon, a modified version of the Martian lightning-sword. She'd even named it, in the tradition of the Medieval knights, so she'd said. Wyrldmaker. A name she'd never explained, despite repeated inquiries by a wide variety of people, each one answered with only a hard stare.

An object darkened the access port before bounding onto the wall.

Samantha ignited Wyrldmaker with a loud _HISS_. The brilliant pulsating blue-green beam illuminated the Martian soldier barely three paces in front of her, the light glinting off of deep black, lifeless eyes. She immediately launched herself at the Martian. The blade made a malevolent thrum as it passed through the air. It sliced through the Martian's torso like a hot knife through butter. The thing hinged in half and collapsed.

“I wish I could do that,” said Roosevelt.

Samantha chuckled. “I bet you do.”

A bolt of blasterfire sizzled through the space between them. “We've got company,” he said. “In there!” He gestured to the brightly-lit door.

Another Martian bounded up.

“Not yet,” she said. In two moves, she cleaved it into three pieces.

Another bolt shot past them. Samantha twitched her hand and another patrol machine toppled over the wall a hundred yards away and crashed to the ground.

“You're enjoying this too much, young lady,” he told her.

A third Martian emerged. Without looking, Samantha beheaded it with a backhand stroke. Its head tumbled into the darkness and its body fell back into the fort.

“Is that a problem, General?” she shot back.

“It is, if it gets people killed.”

A fireball lit up the night across the way, followed immediately by a loud _BOOM_ and a palpable shockwave. One access point down, several to go.

A blaster bolt sizzled past Roosevelt's hat, scorching a sprig of needles. He knelt down and squeezed off three rounds. Two of them hit a Martian in the chest seventy yards away. It stumbled backward, tripped over the battlement, and windmilled into the space beyond.

After that, the entire perimeter turned into a near-continuous round of blasterfire, explosions, shouts, and screams, ebbing and flowing around and around and back and forth like a wave.

Des and Troy spoke eloquently, and Wyrldmaker sang a requiem.

Two of his men appeared out of the darkness, and squeezed off a few rounds before throwing themselves to the floor. “Sir, it's a good thing these bastards can't see squat in the dark!”

“Agreed, Corporal,” said Theodore.

Samantha cut an arm off a Martian, her follow-through passing through internal organs, the blade ending in a guard position. She reflected several blaster-bolts off of it before cutting down another Martian.

Corporal Couch let out a low whistle. “Damn,” he said quietly.

Ten minutes later, a pile of dead Martians lay heaped about the access, most slain by Samantha. The last of Roosevelt's men vaulted up from the catwalk. Three men had died, and eight wounded, two of them badly.

“Private Malone, you and Private Conlan lower Brady and Clinger down the wall, then join us below. The rest of you, you're with me.”

* * *

“I wish they'd turn those off, sir.”

“Ignore it, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” Lt. Dan said through clenched teeth.

Roosevelt sympathized. A bobcat in heat sounded like angel song in comparison. And the dammed Martian klaxon had started not a minute after he'd led the way through the open roof access and had continued throughout the intermittent firefight all the way to the reactor level.

He looked back through the corridor, still brightly-lit despite heavy damage done to the lighting panels, the long scorch marks on the walls, and the Martian bodies on the floor. A dozen men remained, plus Samantha, who stood against the far wall, Wyrldmaker deactivated and at rest by her side, a loop of her bronzy hair hanging out of her doeskin skullcap with its bits of singed lichen and pine still fixed to it.

“Jones,” said Roosevelt, “hair.”

She absently shoved the stray braid back into its place, her gaze trained on the one remaining door between them and the space beyond.

He nodded, then poked at the panel. The light on it changed from amber-orange to green and emitted a coarse chirp. Roosevelt grunted, then tried two more times, without success.

“I think it's locked, sir,” said Dan.

“General?” said Samantha. She jerked her head a little and Roosevelt stepped back.

She made a gesture with her hand. The door twitched. The twitch became a rattle. Moments later, the slab of metal slid into the wall with a screech of protest.

Roosevelt grinned. “Right,” he said, “if it moves, blast it!” He turned and launched himself into the space beyond, bellowing a battle roar.

Ahead, a vast pit occupied the center of the space, surrounded by a walk barely a dozen paces wide. An array of pipes and tubes, some of gleaming steel, others clear and filled with unknown milky or glowing materials. Tendrils of steam and greenish vapor trickled from valves and fittings. Along the walls stood dozens of Martians, all occupied at various workstations covered with panels and lights Roosevelt could barely identify on a good day, despite his brief study with Tesla at Ft. Custer. A wide corridor led off to the left.

On a flat-bed cart near the corridor sat scores of metal cylinders of various sizes, the smallest no bigger than a cantaloupe, at leat half of them roughly like wine barrels, and several about twelve feet long and two feet across. More of the cylinders stood stacked beside a collection of small tubes connected to the morass in the center. Several Martians worked moving the cylinders to and from the tubes.

“Don't hit those cans!” he yelled over his shoulder. If anyone did...no, he'd made a promise to his family.

He stepped to the left, Des and Troy delivering their apocalyptic soliloquy, bolts hitting Martians, control panels, and plenty of unoccupied wall space, the bolt impacts throwing sparks. Behind him, Samantha re-ignited Wyrldmaker and attacked to the right. The other men poured in behind and laid down fire.

He ducked a Martian lightning-sword strike and blasted the creature in the face. A bolt singed his sleeve. Out of the corner of his eye, Samantha carved through a long knot of Martians in a blur of thrumming light and showers of sparks, Martians crumpling to the floor, slamming against the wall, or toppling over the railing into the pit at the center of the room. Flame and smoke from burning Martian bodies began wafting up from below.

A bolt tore through his side. He returned the favor. More Martians poured into the room, many cut down by blasterfire or Wyrldmaker before taking more than three paces.

“Slaughter!” Roosevelt called. “Seal that door!”

“Sir!” Seconds later, something round and sizzling bowled across the floor. It exploded in the nearest doorway, showering Martians with burning kerosene and magnesium flakes. He rushed along the wall and lobbed two lit sticks of dynamite over the mound of dead and burning Martians both whole and rent. Moments later, they exploded.

Roosevelt continued to work his way around the room. On the other side, Samantha continued to mow her way through the Martians pouring out of a door on her side, her own shrieks cutting through the din of battle. Dammit, that girl was enjoying herself _far_ too much!

He met her on the far side, the tip of Wyrldmaker poised a finger's breadth from the neck of a half-suited Martian, its hands and tentacles raised in the human gesture of surrender. It rattled off a string of syllables that sounded to Roosevelt like a series of mostly chirps, clicks, and whistles.

“I don't think so,” Samantha snarled back at it.

It replied with more syllables.

“Convince me,” she said.

Their conversation continued, Roosevelt comprehending only Samantha's half of it.

Roosevelt leaned closer. “You,” he said to the Martian, “I want those klaxons off and control of the doors.”

It made more sounds.

“It doesn't understand you,” said Samantha.

“It's lying.”

“Te...General,” she corrected herself, “it's complicated.”

“Then can you read Martian, too?”

She shook her head.

“Then I want this one as a prisoner. Get it to turn off the klaxons and give us control of the doors.”

“And if it won't?”

“You're in touch with these things, aren't you? Figure it out.” Then, “Slaughter!” Roosevelt yelled. “You and Gump get those charges set! Couch! Get that other door blocked! Sandy! You and the others clear a path for that cart!”

* * *

Roosevelt knelt at the craft's main controls. His eyes scanned the various levers, dials, switches, buttons, and displays. Naturally, he'd seen it all in the captured wreck kept at Ft. Custer. Just as naturally, that one hadn't functioned.

He looked over his shoulder at Corporal Couch and the un-suited Martian captive he had pinned against the bulkhead. “Corporal, go see if that cargo is loaded yet. And get Jones, Slaughter, and Gump up here. I'll keep an eye on our guest.”

“Sir.”

Roosevelt pointed Des at the creature's face and stared into its black eyes. It stared back unblinking. It could have died right in front of him, and he might not have known. He still had plenty of questions for it. Whether Martians understood any English was still hotly debated. This one apparently didn't, though how Samantha could communicate, even she didn't know.

Soft thuds rang on the hull and the occasional muffled explosion rolled through from the hangar as he waited. He wondered how much abuse the craft could take and still remain airworthy.

A minute later, Samantha, Slaughter, and Gump rushed into the flight deck, Couch on their heels.

“Cargo and personnel are secure, sir,” said Couch. “All ramps, doors, and hatches are closed. I blocked most of the access doors leading to the hangar, but I don't think they'll hold for long.”

“How much time do you think we have?”

“Two minutes, maybe three. Another five before the charges blow.”

Roosevelt grunted. “Good work, Corporal.” Then to Gump, “Private, you're the best cryptographer I've ever met. See if you can make heads or tails of this mess while Jones pries more information out of our prisoner here. Corporal, keep an eye on it while I try to fly this thing. Sergeant, I want you on weapons. Private, you too.”

Roosevelt returned to the flight controls while Samantha resumed her questions. The creature responded with its stream of squirrel, humpback whale, cougar, and barn owl, peppered with clicks and slurping noises.

“Sir,” said Couch, “I don't think this bastard is going to help us.”

“Of course it will,” said Samantha.

Roosevelt pointed at a control. “This?” he asked.

“No,” said Gump, pointing at another control, “this.”

Samantha pointed at another. “That, or nothing.” She pushed it.

Green lights all across the controls flickered to amber. A rising hum vibrated through the decking. The ship shuddered as its three main repulsors ignited. Something in the hangar exploded. Roosevelt grinned.

A three-dimensional mid-space image leaped to life. It showed a miniature representation of the ship and the surrounding area to a radius of what Roosevelt guessed to be a little over a hundred yards. Above it, the main hangar hatch remained closed.

“I need that hatch open,” he said.

“Working on it, General Roosevelt,” Gump said. He might not have been the smartest tool in the shed, but the man was an absolute genius when it came to solving puzzles.

The sounds of blasterfire on the outer hull resumed. “Private...”

The image of the hatch began to shift, the plates forming its iris sliding past one another and drawing open.

Roosevelt gently tested the controls, feeling the craft's movement and watching both the image and the wall outside the forward viewport, as Gump rattled off his discoveries, Roosevelt laboring to keep up.

After a minute, and a great deal of cursing under his breath, Roosevelt eased the craft into the air with a gentle bump. Through the viewport, the hangar wall bobbed slightly. He slowly spun the craft, the grainy metal sliding past. Moments later, the bow swung around to face a knot of a couple dozen Martian troopers, all blasting away.

Blasterfire eruped from the ship, and tore into the troopers, shredding them into a barely-identifiable smoking miasma.

“Right,” he said, “let's hope that bay door stays open, or this is going to be a very short trip.”

They rose unevenly, tottering on the columns of super-heated air driven from the ship's repulsors. They presently rose above the fortress wall, emerging into gleaming dawn sunlight. Roosevelt eased the ship forward. It tilted slightly before beginning to move in that direction. It bucked and lurched.

“Goddammit,” he growled, “it's like trying to fly a bull moose!”

The field was not the way he'd left it. A knot of his men huddled in one corner of the fortress. Scores of smoke columns from burning red weed climbed into the sky. Tripods stalked about. As he watched, one exploded and another hit the ground, sending shattered trees cartwheeling through the air. A random explosion bloomed in the red weed patch, and then another.

“Corporal, take this thing below and secure it. Then get that ramp down. Jones, can you lift those men aboard if they need it?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?” she retorted.

“You're still enjoying this far too much.”

“I got to slaughter Martians, General. Why wouldn't I?”

“Just get to work.” That girl had punishment burpees in her immediate future. And if he couldn't compel her to do them, perhaps her mother could.

“Gump,” he said, “can you zoom this display out?” A moment later, the image of the ship shrank to little larger than a quarter.

“That is about a mile radius, General Roosevelt,” said Gump.

“Excellent, Private.”

Minutes later, he eased the craft away from the fortress. Gump and Slaughter pounded the enemy with the ship's blaster and Heat-Ray turrets. Roosevelt tilted toward the nearest ridge. Astern, a gout of fire spewed from the center of the fortress. The flame grew into something like a Roman torch.

“General?” said Slaughter.

“I see it, Sergeant, I see it.”

Roosevelt eased the power up, and tilted toward the nearest artillery unit. He eyed the image display as the fortress disintegrated, blown upward by an expanding cloud.

“Sir, I have a bad feeling about this!”

“Corporal!” Roosevelt yelled. “Are those men aboard yet?!”

“Yes, sir!”

He spun the craft, taking in the view of what should have been a tranquil mountain lake with lazy plumes of geyser steam. Instead, a visibly expanding column of ash jetted up from the ground where the fortress had been. Roosevelt cursed.

One by one, he picked up remained of his teams. By the time the last man boarded, half of Yellowstone Lake was consumed by the ash column. Over the divide to the northwest, a second plume of ash rose into the sky.

Corporal Foster stepped onto the flight deck. “General, sir,” he said.

“I'll take your official report later, Corporal.” He swung the craft around due south.

“But sir, the Major and the Captain...”

“...are on their own. Jones is the single most important person on this mission. You know that.” The craft lurched. “Go below and tell everyone to hang onto something. Use some of that grey adhesive tape, if you have to.”

Foster retreated. The craft bucked again and Roosevelt toggled the intercom switch. “Lady and gentlemen, this is your General speaking. As you might have noticed, our operation has destabilized the Yellowstone Caldera. We may experience some severe turbulence and then explode.”

“Explode?” said Gump. “I don't want to explode, sir.”

“Neither do I, Private,” Roosevelt said through clenched teeth. He shoved the craft into what he hoped was overdrive. The craft lunged forward. A rising whine shook the deck. Out the viewport, trees rushed by a half-mile below at impossible speeds. “Does this contraption have a sternward display?”

“Sir?” said Gump.

“Can you give me a view backward?”

A moment later, a panel flickered to life, showing a view astern. A wall of ash filled it. “Sergeant, how much time do we have?”

“Sorry, sir, I don't know enough about volcanic explosions. But it could be bad. Real bad.”

Roosevelt fought for more altitude and minutes later, they emerged over the Snake River Valley at least a thousand feet below. A line of tripods lumbered through it, all heading north. Roosevelt ignored them as he hurtled past Jackson Hole.

A bright flash flared in the stern viewport. He gritted his teeth, willing the craft to go faster. A minute later, the ship lurched violently. Roosevelt fought for control. Sweat stung his eyes. The ship bucked, the controls nearly slipping from his grip several times before the terrain opened out somewhere north of Pinedale.

Time stretched and squeezed itself into a long string of intermittent turbulence, punctuated by the occasional banging sound on the upper hull.

“Bombs, sir,” said Slaughter.

“I know, Sergeant. Can they hit hard enough to...”

A loud screeching shriek, metal-on-metal, cut him off. The ship pitched sharply to port. Roosevelt fought it as close to upright as he could and throttled back. The craft continued to wag from side to side. Klaxons sounded as engine readouts flickered erratically. He toggled the intercom again. “Hang on, people, we're going in!”

Fields of sagebrush rushed below at a fast gallop. The bow hit at an angle, and plowed up dirt, rock, and vegetation. The whole thing spun around more times than Roosevelt could count, flew up into the air, smacked hard on its belly, and skipped several more jarring times before coming to rest.

For a score of breaths, Roosevelt stared out the dirty viewport. Particles, some dust, some undoubtedly ash, swirled in the air.

“And that, Lady and Gentlemen, is how it's done!” He motioned to Gump and Slaughter. “Let's go.”

The pair followed him from the flight deck. He found the main cargo cabin in pandemonium. At least half of the objects that had been secured had broken away and bounced around. Most of the people had fresh injuries, except for Samantha, who stood there grinning like a maniac, and the Martian, which hung by its tentacles between several structural beams like some sort of spidery squid. Three had been killed outright, one of whom probably wouldn't have made it anyway, crash or not. The rest just looked at him.

“General?” Couch asked.

“We'll have to sit tight for a while, people.”

“But sir, how much air do we have?”

Roosevelt searched his memory for his studies on volume and air usage data from the early submarines. “Four days, maybe five.”

“General,” said Slaughter, “I suggest we move. If it's that ash cloud you're worried about, it's only going to get worse. Sir, I strongly recommend we get out now, head due south, get as far away as we can before the ash catches up.”

Roosevelt looked at Samantha. “Jones, can you erect a, uh, force bubble around us?”

“Not sure,” she said. “Haven't tried it.”

“Gump, are there dorsal hatches?”

“Only the ones on the bottom, General Roosevelt,” said Gump.

“Jones, can you dig us out from in here? Give us enough room to open the ramp and crawl out?”

“Probably.”

“We'll need dampened bandannas, as much food and water as we can carry, and a few stretchers. Let's get to work!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In real history, Fort Bridger was closed in 1890. There's an historic park there now.


	6. Last of the Martians

“Commander! We are losing attitude control!”

Zarthon glared at zir helm officer. “What?” ze spat.

“Orbit is decaying, Syr.”

“Reestablish it.”

“I...I cannot!”

Ze punched a button on zir command chair. “Engineering! Helm reports our orbit is decaying. Report!”

“Skot here, Syr,” said the Chief Engineer through audio. “We have blown three hyperpodic sypoclutchi. That fused the primary interphasic coil, which overloaded the flux capacitor.”

“Fix it!”

“Working on it, Syr.”

“Estimated time to repair?”

“Eighty-seven point three sentoni.”

“Estimated time to orbital threshhold?”

“Thirty-three point two sentoni, Syr,” said the Navigator.

Zarthon blew air out between zir lips. So, it had come to this. This world that had defeated zir people thousands of orbits ago when its inhabitants had scarcely known how to forge bronze, a world that had held the promise of continued life, that cradled life still, had once again defeated its would-be overlords.

How had this happened? How had the Eldrikhi fallen so far in so short a time? They'd ruled the inhabited words of thousands of star systems across a broad wedge of the galactic disk. They had been gods! And now? The last survivors of zir race floated entombed in a dying spacecraft doomed very shortly to plunge through a planet's atmosphere.

Poetic? Perhaps. But who would find zir people's poetry? Who would know or remember zir stories? Likely no one. And now? Now it was too late to learn the lesson.

* * *

For decades, most had regarded the appearance of Novarupta volcano in Alaska to be an anomaly. Eventually, geologists and xenophysicists determined the volcano to be the result of a crashed alien spacecraft. They determined the same of Mts. Pelee, Santa Maria, Ksudach, and several others. In total, nine volcanic eruptions at the very end of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries were determined to have been the result of Martian spacecraft impacts.

The tenth impact had knocked a very large gap through the Sierra Nevada about where Lake Tahoe had been. Witnesses reported seeing a fireball streak in at a low angle out of the east and slam into the mountains. The noise had been deafening, the shock-wave devastating. And that had been from the twelve-thousand-foot Arc Dome several ranges eastward and halfway across Nevada.

The impact flung a great surge of debris into San Francisco Bay, obliterating everything in its path, including what had been left of Sacramento and the surrounding towns, and the Martian fortress on the Sutter Buttes. The San Joaquin River backed up, flooding tens of thousands of acres of farmland and refilling the Tulare Lake bed before bursting around the impoundment to find a new path to the delta. The debris field permanently dammed the Sacramento River clear to Redding. 

The rim of the elongated impact basin crested out at around three thousand feet, well over two hundred miles long and seventy miles wide. The dust cloud blotted out the sun over much of California, most of Nevada, and large swaths of the country eastward. The gap considerably reduced the rain shadow effect along that portion of the Sierra.

The first winter sent Pacific storm moisture as far as the ruins of Fallon. By the following autumn, rising water from a swelling Carson Lake had inundated the entire basin to a depth of at least a foot. Within five years, runoff had swelled the re-nascent Carson Lake and begun to spill over into adjacent basins. Carson Lake merged with Pyramid Lake to the northwest, which in turn began to spill over and eventually drain circuitously into Honey Lake further to the northwest. Runoff into the Walker River increased and filled up Walker Lake and the surrounding basin. And it just went on from there until most of Nevada turned into a collection of interconnected lakes dotted with long islands.

Enough moisture spilled through the Tahoe Gap, particularly during the cold years following, that the Great Salt Lake and its adjacent basins refilled, flooding the remains of Ogden and Salt Lake City, and eventually spilling northward along the drainage path originally taken by the breach of Lake Bonneville thousands of years before.


	7. Oregon's Rebirth

Hollister McGuire ran a hand through his hair. How the hell had he become Governor of Oregon? Oh, right. The reason and the evidence for it surrounded him every hour of every day.

He'd been perfectly content in the Fish Commission, doing what he loved, and doing it far enough from Salem that no one, not even Governor Lord, had been looking over his shoulder. Until the day the Martians had fallen from the sky. Of course, no one in Oregon had known that at the time. Only much later had word filtered in from England, of all places. Given the circumstantial evidence, no one really knew for sure.

The only certainty was that they had come from outer space, bent on world conquest. That first summer, several of their cylinders had descended on the Pacific Northwest. Two had fallen in the Willamette Valley, one somewhere north of Spokane, another on the Olympic Peninsula, another in the Ochocos, and another right smack in the middle of Eugene. That had been the first wave.

It had been bad enough. The impacts alone had ignited wildfires that had torched tens of thousands of acres of forest and grassland. On top of that, the Heat-Ray weapons with which the Martians had set yet more fires. Worse, their Black Smoke had killed hundreds of people. In the month between First Contact and the deaths of the Martians, the damage had been stomach-churning. So it had been with great relief that the first of the autumn rains had arrived early from the Pacific.

And so had come a welcome relief for the people of the greater Pacific Northwest. Rains dowsed the fires, the invaders' bodies and their machinery hauled away by the Army for examination at various undisclosed locations. People cleared the wreckage of their homes and business, and rebuilt. By the time spring gave way to summer the following year, one might not have known that anything remarkable had happened.

Then there had come a second wave. As the following spring had begun to yield to summer, an affair always fraught with indecisive weather in the Pacific Northwest, dozens of Cones had fallen. The forests, still wet from winter, had remained intact. At least for a while.

As before, the aliens—Martians, according to some recently-declassified communication from Washington—dug in, incinerated anything that moved within a quarter-mile radius, and began to deploy their war machines.

A few of the newly-fallen Cones had been shelled by Army units within striking range. The others had deployed their tripods and flying machines as before. Unlike before, their activities had seemed less random. Their targets had made strategic sense. Military bases and manufactories had been primary targets. That assault had lasted more than a year, the occupation broken only by covert operations by Army Special Forces against the alien installations.

Nearly another year of reprieve had closed with another attack in late winter. Thereafter followed more than a decade of horrors. As far as Hollister knew, few outside of Area 51 had kept any written record of the occupation. He only knew his own story, his own guerrilla war against the Martians. He was to learn of others much later.

A Martian tripod lay half-submerged in the Columbia River, two of its legs propped up on the basalt bedrock below Celilo Falls. A metallic tentacle lay like an oversized eel over the edge, and another glinted in the water splashing intermittently against the domed cap of the conveyance. Every couple of minutes, a leaping salmon collided with it with a dull, wet smack before falling back into the churning foam. A sea lion leaned obliviously against it, munching on a fish.

Beyond the river, the hills rolled light green away toward the north, a welcome change from the blackened mess it had been the previous summer.

Most of all, the war with Mars had brought with it unavoidable questions. Questions about the things Hollister and so many others had taken for granted. The veracity of the Genesis Creation. The supremacy of God Almighty. The special place in the cosmos held by man. Yes, the war had left him and so many others philosophically rattled.

Whose version of the creation of the world was true? Or were any of them? Was there something to the accounts of the Watchers and the Nephilim written in the apocryphal book of Enoch? Did the visions of the prophet Ezekiel, his wheels in wheels and strange creatures covered in eyes, pertain to aliens from worlds other than Mars? Had Earth been attacked before, in the distant past? These questions and so many others were bound to be debated ad nauseum in the manner of the ancient Greeks for generations to come.

He looked from the fallen tripod to another on the far side of the river, a third just downstream, and a fourth lodged just above the falls, water streaming through a rent in the metal. Across the river, the fins of a flying machine jutted up toward the sky from where it had crashed into a small fortress on the broad apron to the north of the river.

He'd been briefed on it, that it had been part of a campaign run by one Colonel Andronikus Flatiron who'd also been responsible for earlier victories in Lakeview and Cascade Locks three years ago.

He let his gaze drift downriver toward The Dalles. A shadow of the burgeoning town it had been before the Invasion, it had begun to recover. Like every other community in the state, so much was a complete mess. Property records, probate, and so on.

Some of that didn't matter much. The Snake River flood surge triggered by the eruption of Yellowstone had swept away most of what had occupied the banks of everything along that river and downstream of its confluence with the Columbia. Afterward, changing precipitation and drainage patterns had contracted the Snake River flow and its contribution to the Columbia.

And it was all now a big, steaming pile of His Problem. Oh, joy.

He turned toward a set of footsteps and smiled at his wife.

“Morning,” she said and kissed him.

“Morning yourself. What brings you out here?”

“You do, silly,” she said, thumping him on the arm. “Taking in your domain, I see?”

He chuckled. “Domain?” He smiled at her. “You make it sounds like I'm a king.”

She shrugged. “Well, you did have a meteoric rise, honey.”

“Only because everyone else in line for Governor is either dead or missing.”

“I know, I know,” she said, “and you never wanted to go into politics. But this is America. The people have to vote for Governor in the next election and they can't vote for you if you don't run, right?”

He nodded. “Thanks for the, uh, vote of confidence.”

“Is that sarcasm I hear?”

He took her in his arms and gazed into her green eyes. “Depends,” he said, and kissed her.

“On what?”

“On how long it takes me to get my work done here?”

She kissed him back. “Just pace yourself. You're so good at it,” she purred.


	8. What Became of America

Barbara Willamsdotter McKinley tucked a stray strand of bronze hair behind her ear and sighed heavily.

“Madame President?”

She glanced in the mirror at her Chief of Staff, David Levinson. “Um...sorry, Dave,” she said, “nerves. I just hate these damn speeches.”

Dave just nodded, an unsaid 'I told you so' passing the glance between them.

Of course, she'd signed up for it all. She'd known that even before she'd announced her intention to run for President of the United States of Pan-America. Barely a year into her first term, and she'd already lost count of the number of times she'd asked, of herself and her closest friends and advisors, why it was she had signed up for the job in the first place. She felt no closer to an answer.

“The populace waits for no woman,” Dave said.

Barbara managed a smile and turned away from her mirror. She marched from her office and down the corridor, flat-soled leather shoes tapping on the flooring, the holster carrying the original Wyrldmaker handed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken line tapping gently against her grey leather skirt. Several other aides fell in behind her and Dave.

Near the entrance, she shared a nod with her several-greats grandmother Samantha, clad head to toe in beige leather. Samantha nodded back, her own bronze hair pinned up in a coiled braid, amethyst stones glinting in the light. 

_If I look even half as good after two centuries_ , Barbara thought, _it will be...no, not a miracle, just another day at the office_.

At length, she emerged from the Capitol building through its main doors, flanked by several Special Services personnel, and onto the broad veranda from which every President since the Martian War had given his or her State of the Union Address.

She looked out over a sea of cheering faces in the chilly mid-spring air. A bright blue sky spread over Medford, District of Jeffersia, nestled in the Rogue River Valley between the Northern Californian border and the rest of southern Oregon.

Barbara placed both leather-gloved hands on the well-worn granite railing, exactly where the first President and her several-greats grandfather William McKinley had placed his own hands when the building had only been half-finished.

Beyond the sea of faces, the four obelisks dedicated to William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Meriweather Lewis, and William Clark pierced the blue sky. Beyond those sparkled the smaller columned twin monuments to Merofled LeConte and Samantha Jones. And if there was one unwritten rule about DJ, it was that if it existed, there was a monument or a memorial to it. All constructed or faced with serpentine.

Far beyond that, the still-snowy cone of Mt. McLoughlin rose above the Cascades. Behind her rose snow-clad Mt. Ashland and nipple-shaped Pilot Rock on the Siskiyou crest.

She took a deep breath, and began to speak in her quintessentially extemporaneous style. Oh, she didn't have a speech prepared. Not exactly. And to be sure, her habit of speaking off the tip of her brain had resulted in a great many headaches for herself and her staff throughout her political career. Even before that, come to think of it. But it was always the truth, and that was one of many reasons she'd been elected in the first place, and in a landslide no less, chosen by people from Alaska and the Inuit Territories clear to Cape Horn, from Old Scandinavia and Britain clear to the Solomons and in between.

She began, rhapsodizing on the grit of the Americans who had first fought their way out from under the tentacle of Martian oppression, then gone on to forge a new nation out of the shattered chaos the world had become in the wake of an alien occupation. How the sun never set on the American Empire. How they had learned and grown so much from studying the Martians and their technology. How they were even now, barely two centuries later, poised to strike back at Mars. On and on. And, true to her idiom, she'd have to rely on the recordings to remember just what it was she had said.

Yes, it was a good day to be President.


	9. The Coming of the Humans

Captain James Tiberison Kirk, United States Air Force, gazed down from high orbit onto an orange ball. Crazed with immense chasms, crowned with the four largest volcanoes known to science, and pocked with thousands upon thousands of impact craters, James wondered how any race could ever have called such a place home.

That was the primary purpose of their mission, to ascertain the accuracy of the assumptions, and answer once and for all the question everyone had been asking for two hundred years: had the Invaders come from Mars?

He and his crew aboard the _Enterprise_ had already circled the planet a dozen times. So far everything they'd observed concurred with the images that had already been taken by the Mars Orbital Surveyor. Those, in turn, supported the data collected by the Viking and Pathfinder landers decades earlier.

He shook his head slightly. No, it didn't look to him like the planet had been capable of mounting that kind of invasion. Not in the last million years, anyway. Which was why they'd brought along a ship full of instrumentation capable of peering into the planet in every way imaginable.

Specialist Alaina Henness floated up beside him at the observation port. “It's kind of pretty,” she said, “in a desolate sort of way. And we're sure they really were Martians?”

“If this planet ever harbored such an advanced civilization, we'll find traces of it. We didn't lug all this equipment over forty million miles of space for no reason, right?”

“So long as Watney doesn't try making a red-weed salad,” she said.

“I heard that!” Dr. Mark Watney called from the habitat ring. “Mars will come to fear my botany powers!”

“Whatever you say, slick,” said Alaina, “but I really don't think there's enough life on that rock to fill a Prius.”

“A Prius? That's not a car, that's a lunch-box!”

That brought laughter.

“Okay, people,” James said to his crew, “let's invade Mars!”

“Blood and souls for Odin!” they cheered back.


End file.
